Derek Prince - How To Align Your Life With God's Purpose
This is an excerpt from: You Can Come Through Victorious
Let’s consider now in some further detail how you can align yourself with God’s purpose. I want to give you three successive commitments that you have to make. First of all, as I’ve said already, you have to be committed to God’s kingdom. Matthew 6:33: Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Matthew 10:7–8. Jesus is sending out the twelve apostles for the first time. And this is the instruction to them, verse 7 and 8: As you go preach, saying: The kingdom of heaven is at hand. That is the message of the gospel. It’s not often preached today. I examined this many times. As far as I know, the apostles never held a healing service. They never held a service for people to tarry for the baptism. They simply said the kingdom of heaven is at hand. You can join if you like, if you meet the conditions. I don’t mean it’s wrong to pray for healing. I’ve held many healing services. But I realize that wasn’t the approach of the apostles. The approach was: there’s a kingdom. If you meet the conditions, you can join. If you don’t meet the conditions, you’re excluded.
And then in Matthew 24:14, and I suppose some of you know what that says by now: This gospel of the kingdom shall be proclaimed in all the world. Not this gospel of get your sins forgiven, or you can be healed, or speak in tongues. But this gospel of the kingdom - the message has never changed. It started that way and it will close that way. It’s a message of a kingdom and a King. I’d like to just illustrate this by the reaction of one group of people to whom the apostles came in the city of Thessalonica. And as usual, when Paul turned up there was a riot. I mean, he either had a riot or a revival or both.
I was with a group of missionaries in east Africa just before I went to Canada and to the States. They were dear brothers and they were talking about opening a church in a new area. One of them said, Let’s make them mad, or let’s make them glad, but let them know we’re here! Those are my sentiments. The worst thing is to be ignored. Paul and Silas arrived in Thessalonica and there was a riot. The people wanted to get hold of Paul but Paul’s assistants had learned by that time to spirit him away, so he wasn’t there. It says: When they did not find them - that’s Paul and Silas, it's Acts 17:6 - they dragged Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out, These who have turned the world upside down have come here too.
Now I ask you, would they say that about us? We’ve turned the world upside down, we’ve upset things? We’re really sometimes too polite, too careful. We’d rather do almost anything than upset people. Let’s maintain the status quo, regardless of the fact that the status quo is the devil’s status quo. And then this man said: These people that have turned the world upside down have come here too. Jason, that’s one of the new believers, has harbored them. And these are all acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying: There is another King, Jesus. You learn a lot from the opposition. This was this man’s understanding of their message. He didn’t say anything about the forgiveness of sins or healing. He said, These people are presenting another king. Why? Because they were proclaiming the kingdom. And that’s what upset the local authorities. This is contrary to the rule of Caesar.
I heard a brother once, who’d been a believer behind the Iron Curtain while there still was an Iron Curtain. And he said, You can tell people, Jesus loves you, and no one gets angry. But when you say, Jesus is King, they’ll put you in prison. See, we are not really declaring the essence of the message. There is another king. This is the gospel of the kingdom. There’s a kingdom coming. And you can get into it or you can be left out of it, but you can’t stop it coming. That’s a powerful message. It doesn’t always make you popular. When they proclaimed that message, all sorts of things happened. The sick got healed, demons got driven out. But they never, I think you can check this for yourself; they never had a meeting specifically for that purpose. They had one message: the gospel, the good news of the kingdom.
I believe that’s what we need to align ourselves with. We are here to become part of the work force that will bring in the kingdom of Jesus Christ. I am completely pessimistic about human and humanistic solutions to world problems. I don’t believe man has it in himself to solve his problems. I don’t believe the problems of war or sickness or poverty will be solved by human plan. If that’s all I believed, I would be a pessimist. But I’m not, because I believe there’s another kingdom coming. It’s not far away. There’s a King coming Who will reign in righteousness. And when there’s righteousness, there will be peace. If you study the teaching of the Bible on peace, you will never find any promise of peace apart from righteousness. That’s why the whole peace process in the Middle East is a farce. Because they’re trying to bring peace, but they’re not trying to establish righteousness. The Bible says, There is no peace, says my God, to the wicked. That’s the first thing you have to do is to align yourself with the purpose of God, to proclaim and help to bring in the kingdom of God.