JOEL OSTEEN MINISTRIES
TODAY’S WORD
19/10/23
Today’s Scripture
Finding a fresh jawbone of a donkey, he grabbed it and struck down a thousand men.
Judges 15:15, NIV
ORDINARY TO EXTRAORDINARY
You can have an extraordinary problem, but with the favor of God, He can provide an ordinary solution and make you victorious. That’s what happened with Samson when a huge army surrounded him. He had no weapons, no protection. All he could find was the jawbone of a donkey. It was small and ordinary, but Samson realized that this jawbone was part of his destiny. Even though that jawbone was ordinary, it became extraordinary when God breathed on it.
You don’t have to be bigger, stronger, or tougher to overcome your obstacles. You don’t have to have great talent, the best education, or a certain personality in order to do something great. When you honor God with your life, you have the most powerful force in the universe breathing in your direction. God knows how to take what you may feel is ordinary and make it extraordinary. What makes the difference is God’s anointing on your life when you give Him what you have.
A PRAYER FOR TODAY
“Father, thank You for making me just the way I am. Thank you that You’ve empowered me with the talent, resources, and personality You wanted me to have. I believe that I have exactly what I need to fulfill my destiny as You breathe upon me. In Jesus’ Name, Amen In more than two decades of ministry, I have learned this from the Lord: Without Him, we cannot. Without us, He will not. What this simply means is that we need to recognize the fact that if we do not depend on Jesus, there can be no real, long-lasting and abiding success—without Him, we cannot.
SECTION TWO
The Bible tells us that unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain (Ps. 127:1). Believers who want to experience His success need to recognize this truth and begin to depend on Jesus and Jesus alone.
There are some believers who may not articulate it, but in their hearts, they believe that without Jesus, they can still succeed. By believing and acting on this, they fall from the high place of God’s grace (His unmerited favor) back into the law, back into trying to merit and deserve success by their own efforts.
These are strong words of warning. Once you start depending on your own merits and efforts to deserve God’s favor, you are back under the system of the law. You are cut off from Christ and have fallen from the place of having His unmerited favor work in your life.
Don’t misunderstand me, Jesus is still with you (He will never leave you nor forsake you [Heb. 13:5]), but by depending on your self-efforts, you effectively cut off His unmerited favor in your life.
So what do I mean when I say, “Without us, He will not”? Well, Jesus is a gentleman. He will not force His unmerited favor and success down your throat. He needs you to allow Him to work in your life. He waits patiently for you to trust Him. He waits patiently for you to depend on His unmerited favor, the way Joseph trusted and depended wholly on the Lord’s presence, until His manifested presence took over, and His glory radiated from everything that Joseph touched.
Beloved, let’s learn quickly that without Jesus, we cannot succeed, and if we choose not to respond to His unmerited favor, He will not force it on us. God’s unmerited favor is ever-flowing toward us and Jesus is waiting for us to come to the end of ourselves. He is waiting for you to stop struggling in your own attempts to somehow “deserve” His favor, and just depend on Him.
So in the areas that you are still depending on your own efforts to succeed, start resting in Jesus’ unmerited favor and begin experiencing His manifested presence and glory upon everything you touch!
God’s Word tells us, “For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace [unmerited favor]” (Gal. 5:4 NLT).
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