INTRODUCTION: By: Bishop David
We just finished a 4 day program in our church, and I am currently in a 5 - Day crusade outside town. This serves as the reason why I have not been able to post messages on this site for the last two weeks. The theme of the program / crusade was :OPEN HEAVENS. We thank God for His word and for His Promises which are: "Yea" and "Amen" . 2 Corinthians 1:20; says the promises of God are “Yea” and “Amen”. “Yea” means “yes”. The promises of God are not “yes” then “no”. They’re not “I don’t know” or “Maybe so”. The promises of God are “Yes!” Will He save you? “Yes!” Will He heal you? “Yes!” Will He deliver you? “Yes!” Will He set you free? “Yes!” Will He supply your needs? “Yes!” The promises of God are “Yes” and the promises of God are “Amen.”
Jesus said in Revelation 1:14 that, He is the Amen, the faithful and true witness, and the beginning of the creation of God. Jesus is the Amen! Amen means “So be it.” Amen means “It’s already done.” The promises of God are “Yes.” The promises of God are “So be it.” The promises of God are “It’s already done.” Every promise in the book is “Yea and Amen” but every promise in the book is conditional. The problem God’s people have with entering the promises of God is while God is saying “Yes, it’s already done” to what we want, God’s people are saying “No, I can’t do it” to what He wants. While God is saying “Yes, It’s already done” to what we need, God’s people are saying “No, I won’t do it” to what He needs. God is looking for someone who will say “yes” to His will and “yes” to His way. God is looking for someone to say “Yea” and “Amen” to Him. God is looking for a “Yes” man. God is looking for someone whom will say “Yes, I’ll go”, “Yes, I’ll say it”, “Yes, I’ll do it”, “Yes, I can handle it”, “Yes, I can make it happen.” God is looking for some “Yes” men and “Yes” women whom will say “Yea and Amen” to Him.
In Ezekeiel 22:30, God says “And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land..but I found none.” God is still looking for that man. God is still looking for that woman. God is still looking for someone to say “Lord, here am I.” God’s looking for someone like Abraham to say “Lord, here am I” when he needs someone to make a sacrifice. God’s looking for someone like Moses to say “Lord, here am I” when he needs someone to represent Him before kings. God’s looking for someone like Samuel to say “Lord, here am I” when he needs someone to minister in the church.God’s looking for someone like Isaiah to say “Lord, here am I” when he needs someone to proclaim the gospel to the world. God is looking for someone to say “Yes, Lord.” Jesus said in Luke 6:46 - And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? If He’s Lord, you can’t say “No, Lord.” You have to say “Yes, Lord.” If you say “No” to the Lord, then He is not Lord of that area of your life. And if He’s not your Lord of all, you gradually, eventually find that He’s not your Lord at all. You have to say “Yes, Lord.” You have to say “Yes” to His will and “Yes” to His way. “Yes, Lord, I’ll trust You.” “Yes, Lord, I’ll obey.” “Yes, Lord.” “Yes, Lord.” “Yes, Lord.” Jesus was a “Yes” man! He did everything the Father told Him to do. Luke 2:49 says He was about the Father business in the temple at age twelve. John 12:49 says He was under commandment what He should say and what He should speak. In John 5:30, He said I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me. And in the garden of Gethsemane, said Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. Jesus was a “Yes” man, so I want to be a “Yes” man. Jesus said “Yes, LORD” so I’m going to say “Yes, Lord”. I’m going to say "Yes" and "I’ll do it" because God is looking for someone to say “Yes” and "I’ll do it."
You are all blessed!
I want to bless you with a sermon by a greatly anointed man of God - my country man, Dr D K Olukoya, Leader & Spiritual Father of Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries (International Headquarters: 13, Olasimbo street, Onike, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria).
Here then is the man of God's 'take' on OPEN HEAVENS!
Open Heavens with Holy Disturbance: by Daniel Olukoya
Isaiah 64:1-64:1 Isaiah 64:1
“Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence”.This is a great prayer point, asking God to tear open the heavens and come down with His presence and every mountain will have no option but to melt and flow away.It talks about rendering the heavens.
Isaiah 62:6-7 “
I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence, And give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth”. This is one method of creating open heavens. It is the Holy disturbance that we are talking about, and God enjoys this kind of disturbance.WHAT IS HOLY DISTURBANCE? It is prayer.
The subject of prayer is deep and intense. Those who have been coming to our prayer lectures would have heard a lot about it. If you have not been coming you had better make up your mind to start coming.It is very deep, mysterious and very powerful and this is why unseen forces work very hard to hinder people from praying. They do a lot of hard work to let people do everything but not pray.Prayer is one of the three pillars that uphold Christians and make them stand in the faith.
THE PILLARS OF FAITH ARE:
1. Holiness
2. Word of God
3. Prayer
If you miss any of these, you cannot stand as a believer. Prayer is the only thing that the devil cannot do out of all that we do in the house of God. He can dance, sing, entertain, preach, cancel but he cannot pray. Even angels don’t have the privilege of praying. It is given unto us. It is often said that a Christian is most powerful on his knees. Men may reject your message, despise your person but they are helpless when it gets to your prayers. That is, once you start praying today, it does not matter whether the person you are praying for or about agrees with you or not.When you spend time with God in prayer, it is the most useful thing on earth. Therefore, the most important pre-occupation of the devil and most important assignment is to keep people away from praying and he has succeeded a lot. My prayer is that he will not succeed in your life in Jesus Name.
The enemy will not succeed in my life in the Name of Jesus.The hymn writer says:“Christians seek not yet repose, Hear your guardian angel say; you are in the midst of foes, watch and pray”The man who can really pray has nothing to fear, and everything God can do, prayer can make us benefit from it. If you looked at the Church history, you would find out that every great move of God, any great revival that had ever come to pass, could be attributed to a knee praying, there would be someone that had prayed hard for it. There can be no fresh anointing without a visit to the school of prayer. It is prayer that converts promise to performance. The good thing now is that the arm of God responds to violent praying. When God points a tiny finger at the enemies, they are finished not to talk of when He arises. Jacob prayed violently and wrestled with the angel for seven hours, repeating the same thing until he got it in the morning. He said“I will not let you go unless you bless me”It worked for him. Blind Bathemeus, cried out violently it was prayer and he refused to keep quiet until Jesus heard him and abandoned all others and asked for him to be brought forward. The Bible does not say: “Preach all the time” But pray all the time” 1Thesalonians 5:7, Ephesians 6:18 .When you pray the way you should, your life will no longer remain the same. The spiritual conflict in which we find ourselves is such that even if you believe there is no problem, because you belong to one club or the other, you have women or men with whom you spend your leisure, in this conflict, the deciding factor is prayer. You may think those who are praying are fools.Prayers do not die.OPEN HEAVENSIt is important to understand this issue because it will make us obtain break through for our lives. Many uncomfortable or inconvenient situations will remain the same until you obtain breakthroughs.
An evangelist went to a place where the Gospel had never been preached. He had the Gideon New Testament, and distributed it to everybody. A little boy received one and kept reading it. He read the whole New Testament and did not really understand. He saw where the Apostles received the Holy Spirit and how others too received Him, he too wanted this experience but did not know how to go about it. He resolved into prayer, since he saw there the importance of prayer. Every day after school, he went into a forest to pray till evening. One day, a man dressed in white clothing appeared to him, this man took the small New Testament in his hand and gave him a bigger book and asked him to read. As he started to read, he started to speak in tongues. Of course, the devil was enraged and he wanted to use the boy’s father against him. This father had been complaining about the boy’s absence and he decided to cut off his head that day. As the boy approached the father, the father saw two hefty men, one on either side of the boy each with swords in their hands and their eyes were red and frightening. His father was so afraid that he ran with his cutlass and said he gave up on his intension, that the boy should continue doing whatever he was always going out to do.
Another man went into seclusion on a mountain. He embarked on a 7 days fasting and praying program. On the 6th day, a man came there to pray, suddenly, the lord told this brother to go and tell the man that just arrived to stop smoking, that if he stopped, he would have breakthroughs. This brother was reluctant because he felt God had not answered his own prayers and he was sending him to deliver a message to a smoker. Nevertheless, he went and he came back to his former position to continue his prayers, a man came in. About ten minutes later, the new man walked up to him and said that the Lord asked him to give the brother N500,000 before he started praying. There and then, he signed a cheque in the name of this brother. That was how God answered his prayers for open heavens. Failure, poverty and lack will remain in many places until this breakthrough comes. So if you desire breakthrough in any dimension of your life, today is your day Amen.
You may ask why do we need breakthroughs? Since the fell of Adam in the garden of Eden, the heavens became brass especially the 2nd heavens, became the habitation of dark powers.In the book of Deut 28:23, the bible says heavens can become brass. Deut. 28:23 “ And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron”. If you find God saying that will open the windows of heaven, it means those windows are not always open. There are times when the windows are not open.When the heavens become brass, to reach God will be impossible for a person and the angels of blessings will not come down to meet him. Therefore, we need to bombard heaven with the squads’ missiles of the Holy Spirit.
THE EQIUIPMENT FOR BLASTING THE HEAVENS OPEN
1. Prayer and fasting
2. Worship
3. Praises
4. Holiness
5. Sacrificial giving
I remember the story of a boy who wanted a cow, he kept pestering his parents to give him money, until one day, they gave him $5 as part payment. He kept it in his pocket and was always going about with it, looking forward to the day he would buy his cow.One day in church, the pastor encouraged the congregation to give sacrificially and that God would bless them. After much thoughts, the boy got up from his seat and got to the altar, just as the pastor was about to pray on the offering, the boy dropped the $5 note and stood there and said, “My cow is in this bag”. The Pastor was surprised, and he asked him what he meant. He now told him his story and the pastor recounted it to the congregation. Suddenly, a man got up and said he sold cow and the Lord has just ministered to him to give the boy one. This is how the boy got his cow. That is one area of how you could blast the heavens open.
WHY DO WE NEED BREAKTHROUGHS?
1 It is necessary because many families have been oppressed by strongmen that have been attached to them for hundreds of years, and their activities must be neutralized. There are many strongmen in many families who have decided that nobody in that family would prosper. I pray that those strong men will fall down and die today. Amen.
2. Many were born into covenants of failure and sickness.
3.Many are under terrible curses, spells, jinxes, evil domination and evil control.
4. Many live in the cities but are being controlled from the village, through evil remote controlling powers. They are not free.
5. Many have eaten what they shouldn’t have. One day, a man who was not born again was given a bottle of wine. One way or the other, he did not drink it and he remembered a week later. To his surprise, when he picked the bottle up, he found a human finger inside the bottle. What would have happened if he had drunken the wine immediately. The finger would have worried his intestines and doctors would have been wondering what the problem was. Medical doctors cannot understand a person, into whose body a serpent has been programmed. They will only give him injections that will put him to sleep but the problem remains unsolved because it is spiritual.
6. Many lives have been turned upside down and placed in the circle of vanity household wickedness.
7. Many have many enemies and no friends.
8. Right now, we need it because God’s expectation for our spiritual level is very high and many are operating below the level He wants them to be, Isaiah prayed that prayer we read, in great agony.That is what we are going to do today our main prayer point would be “You heavens open for me in the name of Jesus. Amen. Daniel prayed for 21 days before the heavens blasted open. The message of open heavens is not new at all. It started from the time of Jacob when he slept and had his head on a stone as pillow and he saw angels ascending and descending and he said, “surely the Lord is in this place and l did not know it. This must be the gate of heaven-Gen 28:16. Would it not be wonderful today, for you too catch a vision of heaven, where you would see angels ascending heaven with your request and coming down with the answers?
Jesus in John 1:51 made something clear to us: John 1:51 “And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man”. Matthew 3:13-17 “Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. [14] But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? [15] And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he suffered him. [16] And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: [17] And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”.
Stephen too saw heavens open in Acts 7:56 “And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God”. This is to show that the issue of open heavens is not new. The greatest song of failure that anyone could sing is, “what is gonna be is gonna be, there is nothing you can do about it”. I hope that is not your song. God can do something about anything at any time. For God to pour down His blessings upon you, so that you will have no room to contain it, the windows of heaven have to open. When God gets fed up with His enemies and He wants to pour down His wrath upon them, the heavens will open as in the time of Noah. When heavens open unto you, power will descend. Whatever you put out for sale, will sell and it will be your product that everybody will be looking out for. Favour will bombard your way. Your success will be guaranteed and your enemies will bow.
When heavens open unto you, you will write the obituary of your goliath. David told him that his head would go off his neck that very day, that God would give it unto him: 1 Samuel 17:46 “This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel”. When the heavens open unto you, God begins to honour you and you will have divine approval. Your marriage comes alive, stubborn family members become stubbornly born again.
I remember a woman who came for counseling, her husband always beat her. When she prayed a series of prayers, God made her heavens to open and He touched the heart of her husband. This man now over showered her with love, that she started finding it embarrassing. Another woman complained about her husband and when she started praying, she was warned of the things that might be difficult to understand and bear, that could happen. One day, her husband was accused of manslaughter and was imprisoned. After hearing a message in the prison, he surrendered his life to Christ and became a new man. When heavens open unto you, breakthroughs will bombard you left right and centre.
PRAYERS THAT TEAR HEAVENS OPEN
1. Prayers from a holy heart.
2. Those, that take hold of God’s strength.
3. Those that have fire and power.
4. Those that turn the enemies against each other and themselves and turns their weapon against them.
Unfortunately, many people have suffered spiritual crises because of prayerlessness which stronghold has found itself in the depths of their lives. A prayerless Christian is a powerless one. We have to bombard heavens today. I hope you are ready.The first step therefore is submitting one’s life to Jesus.
If you are reading this message and you have not been born again, l would like you to do so now. Decide to turn away from your sinful ways, repent of them and ask the Lord to come into your life and be your Lord and personal saviour. If you are taking that decision, I would like you to take this prayer:
Father, in the name of Jesus, I come before you today; I surrender my life to you. Lord Jesus, come into my life; take perfect control of my life in the name of Jesus. Amen.
PRAYER POINTS
1.I thank you God for making provision for my prosperity in the name of Jesus.
2. O God, move me from where I am now to where you want me to be, in the mighty name of Jesus.
3.Every mark of poverty in my life, be destroyed by the fire of God in the name of Jesus.
4 Every magnet of poverty, be pulled out of my life in the name of Jesus.
5.l bind the strongman of poverty, in my life in the name of Jesus.
6.I remove my life from the cage of poverty in the name of Jesus.
7.I bind the spirit of poverty in every department of my life in the name of Jesus.
8.O God, give unto me your divine anointing for prosperity.
9. Every load of poverty in my spirit , soul and body be ejected by force in the name of Jesus.
10. Every attachment of poverty to my name, be exposed and cut off in the name of Jesus.
11. I refuse to be blind to my divine opportunities, in the mighty name of Jesus.
12. Let my life be too hot for my enemy to handle in Jesus name.
13. O God, open my eyes and help me to see my situation, the way you are seeing it, in the mighty name of Jesus.
14. Every internal robber of good things in my life, be exposed by fire in the name of Jesus.
15. Any poverty in my life associated with my root and how l was born, be destroyed by fire in the name of Jesus.
16. I uproot, by the power of God, every seed and tree of poverty growing in my life in the name of Jesus.
17. O God, help me not to be wanting in my time and place of goodness in the name of Jesus.
18. Let the power to be at the right place at the right time, for the right purpose fall upon my life in the name of Jesus.
19. I receive the power of God to reap the fruit of my labour in the name of Jesus.
20. The prosperity which no member of my family has every enjoyed, o God, give it to me in the name of Jesus.
21. I confess that Jesus Christ is my Lord and saviour, in Jesus name.
22. I break every oath and covenant which l have made consciously or unconsciously with the kingdom of satan in the mighty name of Jesus.
23. Every strongman promoting poverty in my life, be paralysed in the name of Jesus.
24. Blood of Jesus, destroy every legal ground that the seed of poverty has in my life in the name of Jesus.
25. I receive the power of God to fight and overcome every promoter of poverty in my life in Jesus name.
26. Every control of the…….. over my life be terminated, in the mighty name of Jesus.-Spirit of poverty-Spirit of sickness and infirmity-Spirit of the wasters-Spirit of the emptiers-Spirit of fear-Spirit of confusion-Spirit of diversion-Spirit of amputation-Spirit of evil stabilizer-Spirit of evil arrest-Spirit of ignorance
27. i withdraw every submission and cooperation which l have given to my enemies, in the name of Jesus.
28.Any poverty promoting spirit in my life, be paralysed in the name of Jesus.
29. I destroy every weapon of poverty operating against my life with the fire of God, in the name of Jesus.
30.Every garment of poverty in my life, burn to ashes in Jesus name.
31.Every poverty programme in my life, be scattered in Jesus name.
32. Axe of fire, cut down every tree of poverty growing in my life in the name of Jesus.
33.O God, destroy every power of inherited poverty in my life, in the name of Jesus.
34. O God, give me divine understanding to know what true prosperity is in the name of Jesus.
35. I reject every lie that satan wants me to believe, in the mighty name of Jesus.
36. O God deliver me from every lie that I have been telling myself in the name of Jesus.
37. Every yoke of poverty in my life , break by fire, in the name of Jesus.
38. Any power using my dream to advance poverty in my life, fall down and die, in the name of Jesus.
39. Every maturity date of poverty in my life, be cancelled by the blood of Jesus.
40. I reject and refuse to retain any mark of poverty in my life in the name of Jesus.
41. Fire of God, burn to ashes every cage of poverty covering any portion of my life, in the name of Jesus.
42. Let the thunder of God, break into pieces, every chain of poverty in any area of my life, in the name of Jesus.
43. Let the thunder of God, break into pieces, every chain of poverty in any area of my life, in the name of Jesus.
44. Every poverty thought that I have been keeping, be rejected and destroyed by the fire of God in the name of Jesus.
45. Every hiding place of poverty in my life, be exposed and destroyed in the name of Jesus.
46. Every internal promoter of poverty in life, die in Jesus name.
47. Anything in my life, cooperating with poverty be exposed and destroyed by fire in the name of Jesus.