2 Chronicles 29 (Part 2)

It says, Second Chronicles 29—and we return to the passage we began two weeks ago: “... Hezekiah began to reign when he was 25 years old, and he reigned 29 years in Jerusalem.

His mother’s name was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah, and he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord—there is the key—according to all that David his father had done. In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them. He brought in the priests and the Levites, gathered them in the eastern square, and said to them: ‘Hear me, Levites. Sanctify yourselves now, and sanctify the house of the Lord, the God of your fathers, and carry the filth out of the sanctuary, for our fathers have rebelled and done what was evil in the eyes of the Lord our God.’ Let us go to verse 10. It says: ‘... Now, therefore, I have determined to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, so that the fierceness of His wrath may turn away from us. My sons, do not deceive yourselves now, for the Lord has chosen you to stand before Him and serve Him, to be His ministers, and to burn incense to Him.’ May the Lord bless His holy Word.

The Sunday before last, as I was saying, we began this series of studies about the laws and secrets that lie beneath prosperity and blessing as an underlying foundation. Let me ask a question: How many of you would like to live a prosperous and blessed life? Raise your hand. I hope everyone here would; otherwise, I know a good psychiatrist whom I can recommend to you. In one way or another, we all want to be blessed, and that is part of human nature. Human beings want to preserve themselves, have security, and walk safely through life with blessing; that is a natural instinct. And there are laws that govern prosperity in life, just as there are universal laws in the physical realm that scientists have discovered—and are still in the process of discovering—which govern our movement in the physical world. In the same way, there are also spiritual laws that govern the lives of human beings and determine whether they live prosperous lives or failed lives. There are mysteries that govern human life which we have not even begun to understand, and if we had God’s eyes, we could see many things and understand the reason for certain circumstances that arise in life and that we cannot explain.

One of the things we must continually do as the people of God is try to discover, like miners seeking to extract gold from the depths of the earth, what those laws are and what principles enable a person to live a prosperous life. And let me tell you something as we continue this series of meditations: When I speak of prosperity, I am not referring only to a larger bank account. I am not referring only to having two BMWs in your carport. I am not referring to having a house with 18 bedrooms and four dishwashers. I am not referring only to those things, although material and financial blessing is part of the prosperity God wants to give His children. Rather, I am referring to a state of fullness and blessing. When the Hebrews spoke of shalom—which is translated, inadequately, I believe, as peace in English—they were referring to the total well-being God provides: physical well-being, emotional well-being, family well-being, economic, social, and spiritual well-being. And that is what I believe God wants for His people. That is what I believe Christ meant when He said: ‘I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it abundantly.’ That is the prosperity God wants to give us.

How do we live a successful life? How do we live a full life? As we understand and apply these principles, some of them will be very sublime and obviously spiritual, while others, I believe, will be quite practical, very down-to-earth, and ordinary. But over the next few weeks, as God gives me freedom, I want to share these principles with you. And you will remember that I told you that when I began meditating on this, I wanted to illustrate some of these principles through characters in Scripture, and one of the characters who immediately came to mind was Hezekiah—King Hezekiah—a very interesting, very complex person in Scripture. We see there that Hezekiah was a prosperous king, a blessed king. First of all, beginning with the fact that he reigned in Israel for 29 years—he was king over Israel for almost 30 years. I would think that 30 years is quite a long time to be the leader of a nation, wouldn’t you? And he was blessed in every area. We saw that the Word says, ‘Wherever he went, God prospered him.’ Everything he did was blessed and crowned with success.

What were King Hezekiah’s secrets? But before getting into that, I want to say something very important because, once again, many times when we speak about God wanting to prosper us, or about our wanting to live prosperous lives, some people resist that idea and do not necessarily see the Christian life as the life God has called us to live in that state of fullness. Many people enter the Gospel with mistaken models of what the Christian life is, and they often believe that Christianity is simply about enduring so that God will give us the strength to live poor, suffering, sickly lives. The most that many people aspire to in the Gospel is simply to endure and hold on until Christ comes and takes them away from the misery they have on earth. And brothers and sisters, I want to tell you that this is completely false.

We must change our mental programming because God wants to prosper us, God wants to bless us, and every prosperous life begins with an expectation of being prospered. We cannot enter into the laws of prosperity and blessing unless we first understand that the normal course of a son or daughter of God is toward blessing and prosperity, toward provision, toward fullness of life. One of my favorite verses, a life verse of mine, says: ‘For the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until the day is perfect.’ Hallelujah!

Think of your life as that light which begins in the early hours before dawn, faint and struggling against the prevailing darkness of night, and suddenly begins to shine and put the darkness to flight until it reaches the fullness of midday, dazzling in all its splendor. That is how God wants the course of your life to be. Perhaps your life began like those dark hours before dawn; perhaps you had a terrible and difficult past. Perhaps your parents never gave you the emotional affirmation you needed. Perhaps your father even physically abused you. Perhaps your life was filled instead with words that belittled you, with condemnation, guilt, and accusation. Perhaps you experienced a romantic failure. Perhaps you lived in poverty as a child. But do you know what? The Lord wants all of that to be restored and replaced with His blessing, His light, and His prosperity. Please, do not remain trapped in the patterns of the past. Do not remain trapped in the circumstances of your childhood or your past, because in Christ Jesus all things are now made new.

There is blessing for you. That is what the Word says, isn’t it? If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Unfortunately, many believers do not understand how absolute that declaration is. It is not only on the spiritual level that all things are made new. Rather, I believe that when you receive the Lord into your heart, you pass from a spiritual dimension in which the devil, evil, and negativity rule your life into a dimension where God’s blessing rests upon you. Perhaps your physical address does not change, but your spiritual residence does. The Word of the Lord says that ‘the Lord has transferred us from the kingdom of darkness into His marvelous light.’ The Word says that we have been placed at the right hand of the Father; we are seated together with Christ in the heavenly places. Amen. That means, brothers and sisters, that our spiritual destiny has changed if we are in Christ Jesus.

Unfortunately, many of us enter the Gospel but do not change the cassette. We are still playing the same gloomy, sad, pessimistic melody we played when we were outside the Gospel. In fact, many of us have even grown up in the Gospel but have not received the good news that God wants to bless and prosper us. That is why we are often afraid to undertake new things. We settle for the bare minimum in life. We do not dare take an English course, open a business, buy a house, or begin a relationship because we are afraid of failure. And often we have the idea—and sometimes it is not even an idea; it is something that has penetrated so deeply into us that it is part of the very pores of our being—that we are not even aware of the inferiority complex we have. That is why, when we arrive somewhere, it is as though a curtain descends over us, hiding us from those around us, and no one even notices that we are in the room because we have secretly turned off the light around us. Wherever we are, people do not notice us; often they pay no attention to us. Projects and proposals for this or that come along, and the positions are given to others because, secretly, there is a mental program within us that, like a black hole in space, absorbs every sign of our presence in the world. People do not realize that we exist, and we have subconsciously extinguished every impulse to better ourselves, to struggle in life, to take on challenges, and to conquer things, so we settle for the bare minimum in life. And in the name of Jesus, we must say: That is not for me. God wants to bless me. God wants to bring me out of anonymity.

God tells me, ‘I will cause the barren woman to dwell in a family,’ says the Lord. The Word says, ‘To the woman who has borne no children, what a quantity’e.’ It says that God calls the person who is on the ash heap and lifts him up so that he may dwell among princes. But it all begins with a change in our mental space—the expectation that God wants to bless us.

We will never be able to ascend to the heights of a Hezekiah, for example, unless we understand that when we are in the Kingdom of God, there are now secret nutrients filling and nourishing our lives; that the things we undertake now, we undertake with the breath of God behind us. When we move just a little, it is as though we feel someone pushing us farther forward because the grace of God is behind us. This differs from when one is merely in the world, where what happens is that you seem to be fighting against the force of gravity, and every step you take is difficult and laborious because you face a difficulty whose nature you do not understand. When we are in Christ Jesus, the blessing rests upon us, and we must ask the Lord: Father, change my programming, change my way of thinking, and help me now to see things differently.

There are some brothers and sisters here with whom I spoke yesterday. I am going to take the liberty of mentioning it because we had a lovely conversation—precious young people in the Lord, in whose lives God is doing beautiful things, and I know that God has a beautiful destiny for them. One of the young people was telling me how he grew up in a home where there was a great deal of negativity, a great deal of pessimism, and negative things in the family patterns; how all of this affected his life and the lives of his siblings; and how, even today, these negative influences are still present in his life. His own parents reflect all that negativity accumulated over years and years, and it has been so difficult to break that pattern. Even though the family is now walking in the ways of the Lord, that wall of negativity with which they are constantly struggling is still there—that cold, damp cloth lying over the psyche of every member of the family. And this person asked me why, if one of my parents, for example, knows the Lord and came to Him not long ago—has been in the Gospel for five years—why does that parent continue with the same negative patterns, to the point that I am now afraid to speak with my mother on the telephone because all she does is throw negativity at me and contaminate me even more with it? I tried to tell him that there are many reasons why people come to the ways of the Lord and are in church but continue with those negative patterns. They have not changed their mental space. And one of the reasons, I believe, is sometimes a lack of instruction from the pulpit: instruction that a new day has dawned when a person is in Christ Jesus; that the Gospel is good news; that God is no longer angry with us; that we now have a direct line to the Father and do not have to stand in line and wait for our number to be called. No, now we can go directly to the Heavenly Father, and we can receive help for every situation because Christ has come to break the curse.

When I said that, the event of the paralytic who was at the pool of Bethesda came to my mind like a flash. And the Bible says there that this paralytic had been there for years, beside the pool, because it was said—and it seems to have been true—that from time to time an angel would come invisibly and stir the waters of the pool. And when the people, the sick people who were around the pool, saw that the waters were beginning to move, they knew that an angel was stirring them, and there was a belief that the first person to throw himself into the water was healed. Do you remember the story? And there was a paralyzed man there; the poor man could not move. The deaf and the mute would throw themselves in and be healed, but the poor man was there every day, at the edge of the pool, as a symbol of human misery, close to healing and salvation but without access to it, paradoxically because of the person’s inner limitations.

And the Word says that the Lord Jesus Christ came and approached him, taking the initiative, as God does. Look how great the grace of God is. Many times, there is not even enough strength in us to ask the Lord to heal us and save us, and God in His mercy draws near to us, breaks the inertia, and offers Himself, saying to us: Do you want to be healed? So great is God’s mercy; so good are God’s intentions toward us. And Christ approached the paralytic and said to him: What is wrong with you? Do you want to be healed? And the paralytic said to Him: Yes, Lord, I want to be healed, but there is a problem: every time the water is stirred, someone gets in before I do, and I cannot be healed; I cannot get myself healed. And the Word says that the Lord, with a word of healing, said to the man, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk,” and instantly the man was healed and went away glorifying God. And I have always seen the fact that he took up his mat as part of the sign; on several occasions when the Lord healed paralytics, He told them, “Take up your mat,” and the paralytics went out carrying the symbol of their fall, their destruction, and their defeat, saying, “I am above all that.”

When Christ does a work in your life, He does it completely. He places you above your circumstances, above your ailments, above your limitations. But the most important thing, brothers and sisters, about that biblical incident is the fact that there is a way—before, God manifested Himself to people through sacrifices, through effort, through a laborious system full of toil and often dependent on the information people had and on human skills, such as the system of the law and sacrifices and all those things that prevented many from gaining access to receive the Lord’s grace. That is the Bethesda system. You had to be agile and fast. You had to see the opportunity and have the speed... it was a competition; you had to throw yourself in and seize the blessing before someone else seized it from you. There was competition. The blessing was limited. But do you know what? In Christ Jesus it is different, because the grace of God in Christ Jesus has no limits; it is for everyone. Hallelujah! And it is by faith. And the weaker we are, the more broken we are, the more problems we have, the more negative our past, the more God wants to manifest His redeeming grace over our lives; the more God wants to bless you and raise you up. That is why this paralytic was able to receive the blessing of a generous, merciful, grace-filled Christ who said: I want to bless you. You do not have to make sacrifices; you do not have to find someone to throw you into the water. I am the water of life. I bless you. Take up your mat and walk; walk through life above your circumstances, not beneath your circumstances. Do you understand?

That is the system in which you now operate in Christ Jesus, not the system of the world, the system of the law, the system in which you had to do something for God to love you, for God to approve of you. You had to walk on your knees and show the Lord your bleeding knees and spend ten hours genuflecting and doing all sorts of things for the Lord to bless you. That is over. Now we have a stream of blessing that follows us wherever we go. Now we can say with the psalmist, with a convinced heart, “Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for many days.” Hallelujah! That is the normal state of a child of God. God wants to bless you. But you need to change the program; you need to awaken to this truth that now, in Christ Jesus, there are good purposes for your life. Do not be afraid. There are many brothers and sisters filled with anxiety and fear. And I know that life has sometimes not given us good things, but I want to radicalize your mind and tell you now that, because you are in Christ Jesus, you have a God of whom the Word says that “Christ has opened a wide and easy road to reach the Father,” and you can present your needs to God, and you can undertake great things in the name of the Lord.

Isaiah says in chapter 54, “Enlarge the place of your tent,” and that means enlarge it here. Before you put up a larger tent in your life, you first have to enlarge the place for that tent—that is, the mental space, the conceptual space—and you have to understand that there is a blessing God wants to give you, but you first need to awaken to it so that you can then gain access to it. “

“Rejoice, O barren woman, you who did not give birth; break into song and shout for joy, you who were never in labor, because more are the children of the forsaken woman than those of the married woman,” says the Lord. “Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your dwellings be stretched out; do not hold back. Lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes, for you will spread out to the right hand and to the left, and your descendants will inherit nations and inhabit the desolate cities.” That is God’s destiny for your life, my brother, my sister. Fill yourself with that conviction.

That was my advice to this young man yesterday. Do not worry about all those years of spiritual and emotional hunger you went through. Now that you are in Christ, God has good things for you. Begin to read the Word and single out all those promises of blessing found in the Bible. This is one of the things I suggest to my brothers and sisters who have lived a life of defeat and who live imprisoned by depression, anxiety, and sadness. Look, you need a diet rich in spiritual vitamins. You need plenty of spiritual protein. Your red-cell count has to increase, and that is why I encourage you to look for those passages of Scripture that contain promises and to memorize many of them, and.................. that space of possibilities in your life will become a magnet that will attract blessing into your life.

Confess with your mouth; the mouth of a child of God is radioactive, it is creative. God creates with His mouth, and the children of God also create with their mouths. Confess positive things. If you are waiting until you feel positive before confessing positive things, forget it; that moment will never come, especially if you come from a negative background. But as you confess with your mouth the prosperity of God, the blessing of God, and the good intentions of God, that will change your brain and reprogram you so that one day you will begin to feel those things. At first you will feel like a great hypocrite when you speak positively, but little by little your brain will be reprogrammed. Psychologists know more and more, following all the explorations being done on the human brain, and there are so many ways to trace the formation of brain programs and how the human mind functions. They have confirmed time and again that the brain is the most flexible thing in the world. The brain recalibrates itself and establishes new grooves through which brain communications run, and that often depends on what we visualize. There is a very interesting book called Mozart and the Brain of the Fighter Pilot. It is a book about how the brain works, and it is very interesting to see the things this well-known neuropsychologist says. A great deal of research has discovered that if a person visualizes certain things, there are literally areas of the brain that begin to function as if the person were actually experiencing them, and the brain begins firing neurons and neurological connections that make it seem as though the person were living those things, as though it were a real experience. In other words, visualization has tremendous power even to reestablish the brain’s physical structures.

So when you visualize positive things in the Lord—I am not talking about positive thinking according to men; I am talking about Christ Jesus—visualize positive things, confess positive things, undertake positive things even if you are trembling with fear. Launch out in the name of the Lord. Do something new and different that frightens you and makes you wonder, “How did I get myself into this?” God will get you out. God is powerful. Try, and if you fall off the horse, get back on until you can remain steady. Hallelujah!

Do not wait until you feel like a lion before roaring like a lion. Roar like a lion, and perhaps you will be surprised that two or three will flee from you, and little by little you will feel the heart of a lion within your own heart. But you first have to believe. Brothers and sisters, what matters is what God has said, not what you say. Your calling is simply to confess the Word of the Lord. The responsibility is His. Pray for others. Some think, “Well, I do not have the gift of healing.” Look, the Lord has given His anointing to every believer. As we were saying, as Gregory used to say, we are all ministers. Even if you do not feel the anointing, pray. Pray for someone; intercede for someone. And that will cause your faith to increase; that will cause your confidence in the Lord to grow. And who knows? One day you will be surprised: God will heal someone, and your faith will increase. Do positive things. Believe in the blessing of God. Believe that God has good things for you, and then walk by faith. Walk by faith, and you will see that faith will begin to become part of your mental and spiritual program. Believe that God wants to bless you. Prosperity begins there. Before you can be a King Hezekiah, you have to be an ordinary believer who believes that God’s blessing is upon your life.

The Lord says, “For I know the thoughts that I have concerning you, thoughts of good and not of evil, to give you the end you hope for.” God has brought you into His kingdom so that you may be blessed, so that you may prosper. If you are in ministry, if you want to work in ministry, look, God has called you to success. Enter ministry to reign over the spiritual realm. Do not enter it for small things. Believe that God called you and that God has great things for you, and stand firm there and serve the Lord. Give Him everything you can, and undertake great things in the name of the Lord, and God will prosper you and bless you. “I will be with you all the days of your life,” says the Lord. “Every place the sole of your foot treads will be yours. See that I command you to be strong and courageous,” says the Lord, “for I am with you.” That is the word for you this afternoon, my brother, my sister. Receive it in the name of the Lord; change your program. God wants to prosper you. God wants to prosper you.

Let us stand. Hallelujah! Glory to the Lord. Let us change our program. Let us change our program. Hallelujah! I wish I had ten lives so that I could live each life successfully in the Lord and prove this principle. Wherever you go, God will go with you. If you go to China, God will bless you there. Open a Mexican restaurant, and you will see that God will prosper it. God wants to bless you. God wants to prosper you. Do not worry. There are brothers and sisters who live in fear: What if immigration catches me and takes me back to my country? What if this happens...? God is the Lord of the moon, the earth, Jupiter, and all the planets and galaxies. He is the same wherever you may be. He can bless you here; He can bless you at the ends of the earth. God can make water spring from the rock. God can open the sea so that you cross on dry ground. God can make manna fall in the wilderness to feed you. God can keep your shoes from wearing out and your clothes from wearing out on your body. He can provide light in the midst of darkness, a pillar of fire to light your way at night, and a pillar of smoke to cover you during the day and show you where God wants you to be. God wants to bless you. He has called you so that you may prosper, so that your children may grow and be blessed, so that your household may lack none of the necessities. Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Hallelujah! And when everything is finished, I will dwell in the house of the Lord for many days, says the Lord. God’s blessing upon your life.

Father, we adore You; we bless You, Lord. Thank You for Your Father’s heart, so great, so great. Thank You because Your love is beyond comprehension, Lord. Thank You because we would be startled if we saw how Your heart beats toward us, Lord. How good You are, and that is why we love You; that is why we bless You, Lord; that is why we rejoice to be in Your house. I ask that the minds of my brothers and sisters be renewed, Lord, from the youngest to the oldest on this day. Change our minds, Father; change our program. Help us to live aggressive lives in Christ Jesus, with the great expectation that You have things for us. Give us conviction, Father. Give us conviction of Your blessing. We love You. We rejoice in You and bless Your name, Father. We adore You. Thank You, Lord Jesus. Amen. Amen.