Mensa Otabil - Take Possession
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This is day number 28 of our 40 days of power. We’re getting there slowly. Deuteronomy chapter 11, verses 22-23: «For if you carefully keep all these commandments which I command you to do, to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all His ways and to hold fast to Him, then the Lord will drive out all these nations from before you, and you shall dispossess greater and mightier nations than yourselves.»
God speaks to Abraham’s descendants, the children of Israel, as they’re thinking of going into the promised land. This statement is coming 600 years after the experience of Abraham. Six hundred years ago, Abraham had seen the land, walked in the land. God says, «I’ve given it to you.» Six hundred years later, his descendants have come to claim the inheritance that God promised to their great ancestor, Abraham. So God gives them two actions that they must take. Remember, He says to Abraham, «You have to seed and walk in the land.» Now He says to his descendants two things that are going to happen. One of those actions will be undertaken by God; God is going to do it, and the second one, the children of Israel have to do it.
So the first thing God says is, «I will drive out all these nations.» This is what God says: «I’m going to do it. I’m going to drive out these nations.» This is God’s part; it is a spiritual part. The reason why there is a spiritual part to it is because, 600 years after the promise to Abraham, people have gone to possess Abraham’s land. They are now living on it; they’ve built cities, they’ve built walls, and they’re worshiping other gods apart from the God of Abraham. So God says there’s a spiritual dimension to what is going on. These people have their gods; they have their idols, and their power is derived from these idols. That is what I’m going to do for you: I’m going to nullify the power of the gods; I’m going to destroy their gods so that, in the realm of the spirit, you have an open space to possess.
So for everything God gives to us, there’s a spiritual aspect to it and a physical aspect. The spiritual aspect, God takes care of; the physical aspect, we take care of. We don’t fight God’s battle, and God doesn’t fight our battle. He deals with the spiritual things; we deal with the physical things. So He says to them that after I’ve done that, He says, «You shall possess the land.» He didn’t say, «I will possess the land.» You are going to possess the land. In other words, you are going to do the physical work of actively possessing the land that God gave to Abraham. So after the Lord wins the spiritual battle for you, you have to fight the physical battle. Now many times, when we pray, we are asking God to do the spiritual warfare for us; we’re asking God to deal with the things we can’t deal with, the spiritual things. But after we finish praying, we have to get to work. That’s the physical aspect of it, and these two always go hand in hand. We pray, «Lord, take care of the spiritual,» and then we get to battle.
So in these 40 days of power, God is taking care of spiritual things for us. He’s breaking down strongholds, He’s defeating the strong man, He is disarming principalities and powers on our behalf, and enforcing our victory in Christ Jesus. But when He has done that, we have to go in and possess what God has given to us. Our battles are largely physical, but God clears the way for us spiritually. So there is a way God has made for you spiritually. Don’t stay so much in the spiritual that you forget your physical responsibility of actively getting to war, getting to battle. I don’t mean physical battle in a real sense, but I mean the physical steps you have to take in order to possess what God has given to you.
Let’s pray. Say with me, " Heavenly Father, you have won the spiritual battle for me. Now I go ahead to win the physical battle in Jesus' name. Amen and amen.»