Welcome, I'm Melissa with Rise and Shine, and Tony and I are here to share a little bit of God's Word today, and we hope you're able to follow along with us and see what's going on in the body of Christ and what His plans are for us. They are still the same. He wants victory for us. He wants us to advance His Kingdom, and He wants us to have a note of victory and gratitude in what we're doing for Him in the Kingdom.
And if you're a part of that, we invite you to join along with us and let's get some stuff done. Please connect with the Rise and Shine by visiting our Facebook page at facebook.com slash a Rise and Shine TV show or emailing us at a Rise and Shine TV at gmail.com. We look forward to connecting with you. We want to pray and just invite the presence of God into this process, and because that's what we desire is for His will to be accomplished in this, and so let's just do that.
Father, we just approach you before you're thrown and we come before you in the name of Jesus, knowing that you always hear us when we pray, and when we come according to your will and to your Word. Father, we ask you for utterance. We thank you for the ability to speak, by the Spirit, the inspired Word, Father God, in what you have in your heart. We ask you for us to convey, Lord, your heart to the people and to say and to Lord God to express exactly what you desire for them to experience today.
And we thank you Father, not just for just standard teaching, Lord, but we thank you for not just Word, but Father for the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the anointing that makes the difference. He's the one that causes the Word to come to life and causes it to change the hearts of people. And Father, we thank you for doing just that in Jesus' name, Amen. We're going to start with this segment's a little different than it's been before, kind of putting Melissa on the spot because we usually never have notes, we never use notes, but we might write some things down, but most of the time we don't, what we'll do is we'll have a direction that we believe the Spirit of God is leading us and we'll have Scripture and then we'll go from there, and just allow the Holy Spirit to just quicken us.
But now you can't do that if you don't spend time with Him and in His presence and in His Word on a daily basis, that's just the way that the Lord uses us, it seems the most. But what we want to talk about today is even more from a heart than it has been before, because in the light of the things that are going on in the world around us, everybody knows and I'm sure there's nobody out there that is not aware of all the things that's going on. And in the past years, things have changed dramatically in the world around us. And we want to just talk about that just a little bit, but we're going to look at it probably in a different light than you would probably think that we would, because what we want to talk about is how do we get to where we are?
I think sometimes as human beings, in a human nature, nobody wants to take responsibility for anything. Everybody wants a human nature to advocate or to push off your responsibilities on to other people. That's why we have so many people in their society that are so willing to sign up for any kind of government aid that they can possibly get, because after all, it's just easier, everybody wants somebody to support them while they can lay around and do whatever they want to do. That's just a human nature.
But that's not how you succeed and that's not how you find why you were put here, and you sure can't fulfill your plan and purpose that God has for your life with that kind of mentality. And I think we get the idea sometimes that God is 100% in control. We really don't have a whole lot to do with anything that happens in our life or even in the world around us. And we somehow, we never mention, we never talk about, we never discuss even the fact that there is an outlaw spirit on the planet called Satan who is hell bent on stealing and killing and destroying anybody and everybody that he possibly can.
Because you never hear that, anytime you hear anything that goes wrong and it goes in a direction that's not good for us. It's always either God's fault or he's allowing it or he's caused it or whatever. And I know we're going to start with, we just had an experience, a couple of experiences, I say experiences, it's just really, it's just to me, it's just a lot of people say, well, you're a preacher and that's why you do what you do, that's why you have these experiences. But I don't believe that so.
I believe it's just because I'm a person that wants to serve the Lord and that tries to be sincere and tries to be genuine, not perfect, but I want to do the right thing. And Melissa, tell you probably the most important thing in my life is serving the Lord and fulfilling his plan and purpose for my life. That is my goal. That's the only reason for me in here.
I'll let my family thank God for my family and I want to be here for my family. But ultimately, that is really the reason, that's the reason we're all here. I mean, he created us for a purpose and for a reason. So there must be something that he wants us to accomplish and he wants us to do in this span of time that we have here on the planet.
And I guess I have such an awareness too that there's going to come a day and it's going to be real soon that we're going to have to stand before him and we're going to have to give an account of our lives and what we did with our lives. You know, and did you make an effort to pursue what I wanted you to do? Did you fulfill what I wanted you to do? Just like what we're doing here right now.
This isn't something that we chose to do. It's something actually that in the beginning that we were real sure that we wanted to do. And you know, we would probably try to do something else other than this because it was just something that just wasn't us. It's not something that we had an ambition for, a desire for.
But now we know the way it came to us that it was supernatural in such a way that we have no other choice but to accept it, embrace it as the will of God for our life, for this time. And so therefore, we're responsible for it and what we do with it and how we handle it and what we teach and what we bring to you. And as we look around in the world, it's just going nuts and going crazy. And you know, in the part of the world, it doesn't bother me so bad that the world, you know, is going nuts because I mean, it's just the world.
It's just the world does what the world does. They're lost. They don't know Jesus Christ. They don't know right from Rome, you know, and they just kind of go through life doing what they do.
But my main concern at this point in my life, I have an internal, the word that the look for is just a sense of great concern for the church, for the body of Christ. Because what I'm seeing and what I'm looking at is I'm seeing how what's going on around us is having such a dramatic effect on the church world and on Christians, even on born again, spirit, filled Christians. And that's what troubles me. And I know Melissa, you know, will verify this because she's has been with me and we, you know, we've talked about these things and shared them that it's probably been back, I guess now probably four months or so before we ever heard about anything that was going on as far as, you know, any kind of viruses or any kind of all this stuff sort of taking place and all of that we were just sitting in a local restaurant like we do all the time, you know, when we're sitting there and we have a tendency to, you know, to talk about the things of the Lord some and, and we're just sitting there talking about that and, and then suddenly just all of a sudden the spirit of God just rises up on the inside of me and comes on me extremely strong.
Ezekiel talked about the hand of the Lord being on him, then he talked about the hand Lord being mindily upon him. This would have been one of those times when I would consider it to be somewhat mindily upon me because I, we're just talking about something totally different than what was getting ready to happen. These words started coming up out of my spirit out of the only inside of me and it was so strong that I almost, I mean, it was really hard and very difficult for me not to scream these words out and right in the middle of this restaurant. I mean, it was that strong and I heard myself saying that he said, I am more than capable of taking you to the other side.
And of course, when you say something like that and it was most definitely inspired by the spirit of God, it was not anything that I was thinking about, not anything I premeditated. It was not something that had been in my thought life where I don't know how long, you know, and this all of a sudden this comes out and I know, you know, that he is able to do this and to do whatever he needs to do and take us to the other side. So you have to, you know, you go like, okay, I wonder what this means. And so you don't know.
So what do you do? You just say, okay, Lord, I trust you. No matter what comes, no matter what's out in front of us because we don't know the future all the time. And let's see if he feels it to us.
Then no matter what comes or what happens, I believe you're more than capable of taking us through and getting us to the other side. And that other side has to be a place of where he's willing, his plan and purpose is being accomplished perfectly. See, that's what I believe. It's like when Jesus told the disciples, getting about and go to the other side and all of a sudden, a storm comes out of nowhere, a horrendous storm that tried to destroy him.
And Jesus said, oh, he told him, go to the other side. And he went to sleep. And that whole story you could go into. And what's funny is, is he didn't get aggravated because of the storm.
You know, he got aggravated because of the lack of faith and what he told him to do. Yeah. And you know, when the Lord tells you something like that or you hear something like that, lots of times you have the, well, it's just, like you said, it's just human nature. You try to put it in one vein, you know, of, okay, so he's going to take us over.
I don't know. Maybe we're going to have a bump financially or, you know, this or, you know, you try to put it in one certain area of your life. But I think he gives you that broad word because how much, how far are you willing to take that? How much of that are you willing to receive?
You know, are you going to limit him to one specific thing or, or, you know, one issue that you're dealing with? But he gives us such a broad thing that it's however much of that that you can receive and that you're able to hold on to and apply that to that he can, that he can just, by his spirit, just cover all those areas, you know, and, and secure you in anything that you can believe him for because he didn't say something specific. So you can just grab a hold of that and just push that in every, everything that you come up against. But it's saying, so people, you know, you hate to say this, but, but it's the truth.
So many Christians are narrow minded. When I say narrow minded, they're, see what she was talking about, she's talking about not being narrow minded, taking a word that the Lord would give you and having the ability, you know, that freedom, and it is freedom to be able to do this, freedom to be able to apply that word in your entire spectrum of your life, whether it's spiritually or mentally or whether it's physically, socially or financially. In other words, he's saying, no, people don't even understand, they don't understand. You know, he didn't just come to save us from hell.
He come to redeem us. He come to deliver us and we're going to look at some scripture, you know, as we, as we, as this begins to unfold, about that it is God's will for us to be delivered. But when we heard that word, we didn't know what was going on, you know, during that. And so we just, you know, we go on, we, you know, I, I, we learned a long time ago to just marry a little teenage girl when the angel appears to her and said to her what he said, and it could have been quite overwhelming.
I mean, she never doubted him. She did ask him how, which she had a right to do. He didn't rebuke her for it, but she simply said, be it unto me, according as you had spoken. Here's your hand, maiden, be it unto me.
And that's probably one of the wisest things when we think that we've heard from the Lord, and it is the Lord. It's not something else outside of that. I'm talking about when you genuinely know that you've heard from the Lord. And there's ways that when you hear from the Lord, you know, it's just like, when, with that, I didn't have a doubt about that.
And there's been other times when I know the Lord has spoke to me, you know, and it's just like, or I can sense something. And there's ways, you know, he said my sheep will hear my voice in a stranger, they won't follow, you know, so. Because if you try to think about it too much, you'll limit him. You'll limit him, right?
You know, so as time went on, you know, it was only just a few days after that. I went to bed like I always go to bed. I fell asleep like I always fall asleep. And somewhere in the early time of the morning, I had a dream.
And it was one of those, you know, and I've had quite a few dreams over the years, you know, and I can tell when it's just a dream, and I can tell when it's a God dream. And this was a God dream. And so we, in this dream, just all of a sudden, I don't remember anything before it. I don't remember anything after it.
All I remember is I'm walking down this road in the dark, and it's very, very dark, and there is cloud cover. So there's no stars. You can't see the moon. It's really dark.
Okay. And there's woods all around me. And I'm on this gravel road, walking down this gravel road out in the middle of the country, what you might think. And there's no lights.
There's no houses. Just woods. And so I'm walking, you know, and while I'm walking, it's amazing. I know the way I dream, I can see color.
I can sense things. And actually, it's like you feel things like it was really happening to me physically, you know, and in my dream. And in this dream, I had a strong sense of danger to the point that there was like fear was trying to encroach upon me. And I could tell, you know, I didn't see there was no people, but I could tell that there was something out there in this darkness, in this unknown area that was dangerous.
And I could sense it trying to come on me. And so as I turn this curve on this road, I come up on a little small wooden frame building over here on the right. And this little wooden frame building, it looked like what you would see out in the country somewhere that was like a lumber yard or like a furniture where they would make furniture some older, you know, like a family-owned thing. It wasn't a big factory or anything.
I just little wooden frame, you know, building, you know, older building. And there was a sign on the top of it. And it was just gentlemen standing up there. And this gentleman standing up there.
And it was a black man of all things. Why? I don't know. It was a black man.
You know, a tall cylinder like black man standing there. And it was a sign that said, this is what it said. It said flourishing in times of adversity. And I went, of course, I'm standing there looking at this in my dream and I'm going, wow, that's interesting.
You know, that's really good. And I'm thinking about what I've seen from this gentleman's perspective. I thought, wow, this is really cool. I said, in this environment around him with all this stuff that's going on, I said, God is blessing him.
And I said, and he's flourishing. In other words, he's producing abundance of fruit in his life, you know, in so many different ways in such a time of adversity. I thought that's really neat. I mean, I thought that was really great.
And I'm still thinking that it's for him. And, you know, and I'm sure it could be him. And so after I see that, I start, I'm going to go on down the road. Here I go.
I begin to proceed on down the road. But as I begin to take a few steps, I begin to realize that there was intimate danger in front of me. It was going to come. And I didn't know what it was.
And I thought, I can't go that way. If I go that way, it's not going to be good. So I thought, okay, I'll turn around and go back. Well, the same thing.
I knew I couldn't do it. If I go back, it's not going to be good. So then what do you do next? Next thing you do, you know, I thought, well, I'll go up into the woods this way, you know, and I couldn't do that either because I started off the road.
The moment I stepped off the road, I knew that I if I went up into those woods, that it would not be good. And so when I'm thinking, you know, you're thinking danger, you're thinking, you know, you could be killed or you could be hurt really bad or God only knows what's out there, you know, thieves, robbers or whatever, you know. And so I did not go. I turned and I stopped and I turned and I looked at this building again.
And I saw it again. It said flourishing in times adversity. And so what did I do? I turned and I went in that building.
And the moment I walked in that building, I woke up. And then I knew what the Lord was telling me. He said, there's times that adversity is coming. There's going to be times when danger is going to be all around you.
He said, but in those times I have not changed and I will take you to the other side and you will flourish when all others are not. Many others will not. And the only reason they're not is because they have not been willing to put their faith interest in me. And so I knew that.
And so and then you can ask Melissa, she's sitting right here, she knows, you know, in our home. I mean, and there and all this time that's going on and I know that there's probably been those that are out there that have been affected by what's going on in our society. But it has affected us very little. As a matter of fact, it has our finances has took off like a rocket and we are flourishing more financially now than we ever have in our life.
And just all the rest of the blessings that God has for us, we've been walking in those blessings and see, we know that God's will hasn't changed. See, no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstance, no matter what's going on around you, God's word does not change. You are still who He says you are. He still is, whoever He says He is to you in everything He's accomplished in Christ Jesus has still been accomplished and He doesn't take things back.
He doesn't say, okay, that was first season, but now I'm not going to do that for you anymore. Know anything He ever releases into the earth is there forever. As long as the earth remains, it will remain there. And it's for everyone.
And it's for everyone. It's not just for just any individual. I believe that's not just a message for us. I believe that's a message for the church.
God's wants the church to arise. He wants the church to flourish because my goodness, guys, the world needs some kind of an example of an answer. And the problem with right now is the church is the laughing stock of the world. And the reason the church is, are you ready?
Now when I talk about the church, I'm not talking about just an individual group of people, a local church. I'm talking about the church as a whole. But when I say the church is a whole, I'm talking about all of them. The problem is the church doesn't have any power.
They don't have any power. All they've got is a message with no signs and wonders to back it up that even prove that what they say is true. And because of that, the world is able to dominate us. See, the church is backslidden.
That's what the problem is. Now, when you think about it here in Matthew chapter 5 and verses 14, this is in the red, Jesus said this. And he told that he was telling those disciples that were following him. He told them that they were two things and these two things are extremely important, what he told them that they were.
And if you just do a study on what these two things are, you will understand better what our purpose is for on this planet, why we are here. Number one, read verses 13, read 13, 14. And well, you can read, yeah, just read 13 and 14 and 15 right now. 13, 14, I'm sorry.
He are the salt of the earth, but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men. But ye are the light of the world and a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. It's two things he said that those that were to follow him and eventually this goes on and develops into being the church, which is the body of Christ.
And you could spend some time talking about that, the fact that the church is the body of Christ. But here he calls us salt. Salt is an important element on this planet. And when you think about the purposes that salt is used for and then you use that in connection with what he says about us, that salt number one is preservative.
I mean, for years and years and years, they did not have refrigeration. And the only way that they could preserve certain things, especially meat, was they had to cover them in salt and it would allow whatever it was they covered to last longer. It would preserve it. Guys, and it says that we are the preservatives.
And so it's easy for church members, for born again believers, even spirit-filled believers, to look around and they get so caught up in what is going on in the world and start pointing fingers and start trying to figure out, you know, this person is the blame, this group is the blame, these are the blame and they go on and on and on and on. I'm going to tell you, you want to know why the world is in the condition that it's in right now? It's because of the condition of the church. The church is the salt.
It is the one that's called by God to preserve this planet. It's the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that living it out in the daily life that curves and pushes back the darkness in the sin around us. It affects people. It affects the way they behave.
It will even affect the world. The only reason that we have evil, what is the same? It's been said. The only thing that you have to do, well let's say it this way, the way evil progresses and grows and produces itself is for good men to do nothing.
I mean it's just like your yard. If you don't take care of your yard, if you don't on purpose do certain things, there are going to be things grow up in your yard automatically without you doing anything. And the only way that you can change that is you have to be willing to put forth the effort to be the caretaker of your lawn and of your yard. It's the same way with this planet.
Guys, the body of Christ, the church is the most powerful, the most influential organization or entity or whatever you want to call it on this planet. There is no stronger. You know they say that the president of the United States is the most powerful position on the planet. And I'm sure in a natural state or a natural plane, that's true, but I'm going to tell you something.
Little old white-haired woman that weighs 110 pounds that knows how to live right and knows how to pray can have a greater, more influence on this planet than the president of the United States. Matter of fact, the president of the United States we get is more determined by what the church does than anything else. Are you listening to me? You can complain about who gets elected and not vote and then not pray.
And I'm going to tell you something. You get what we live out. See we're living out today guys. We're living out today the decisions we've made in the past.
We didn't just get here to this place all of a sudden. This has been a gradual thing. This has been decades that has taken the church to a place where all of your major denominations on the planet are embracing evil at a level that you would never think they would embrace it and telling everybody it's okay. How did we get to that place?
Because we're backslidden. Because we're backslidden. Because our hearts have been turned away from God and other things have become so much more important to us than God. When social media is more important to you than reading your Bible, I don't want to tell you this, but you're backslidden.
God's word is what it takes to sustain you. And I'm telling you it's time that we need to quit getting our opinions from social media and from the network of news all the time and going to see what God's word stands. See I know exactly what's going on. I'm telling you I know exactly what's going on.
And it's because of the condition of the church that we are where we are today. Well, that's all we have time for. That went fast, didn't it? We're going to continue on in the next segment we invite you to listen in.
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