-Dr Mensa Otabil at IGOC 2021,
Day 1
UK
It’s a great honour and a privilege once again to be part of IGOC (International Gathering of Champions). I want to thank God for the great opportunity He has given us to minister God’s Word and I want to express my great respect and honour to God’s servant, Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo and to his beloved wife, Pastor Yemisi.
Pastor Matthew, you know the great respect I hold you in and the honour I hold you in for the tremendous impact of your ministry over the last, so many years, probably 30 years. I got associated with IGOC in 1998 and so it’s been a pretty long time being on this platform and just to the extent and the levels that you take each one of us and the body of Christ and the impact that your ministry has had in defining our own sense of what we can do for the Kingdom of God and so, thank You Sir for challenging the Body of Christ to excellent, to quality, to prayer and to boldness in our endeavours for the Lord.
Thank you so much Pastor Matthew, I trust that our contribution at this time will be a blessing to the participants of IGOC 2021.
The theme for this year’s Conference is:
HIS EXTRAORDINARY WORKS and it is anchored in Isaiah 28:21 and in that message, God’s awesome works are sighted and His unusual acts are sighted and there are two locations where God did those awesome works; Mount Perazim and in the Valley of Gibeon.
Now if you are familiar with your Bible, on Mount Perazim, God worked a breakthrough for David against the Philistines and in the Valley of Gibeon, God worked another work for Joshua when He extended the time for Him to finish his assignment by stopping the sun and the moon. Church Gist. So these are two breakthrough events that had been sighted to anchor God’s extraordinary work. So I believe there’s going to be a breakthrough in your life and that God is going to allow time to favour you in this season that we are in.
I will position my message for today in the context of where we are in our world today and so the title of my message is:
NO LIMITS.
In Mount Perazim, God broke the limit by giving David a breakthrough and in the Valley of Gibeon, God also broke the limit by extending time to favour His people and I believe that we are in a season where God wants to break limits in our lives and extend time to favour us, use this time and season and opportunity we have to favour us.
I read about how circus animals are trained, for those of you who have been to a circus, you’ve probably seen elephants doing some marvelous things. At the Circus, they are becoming less and less popular this days because the training process was very cruel but what I read about the training process of elephants who perform at the Circus is a very painful process but it’s also an instructive process for us that I think we should pay attention to if we are going to survive in this current crisis that our world is in.
The process starts with disconnection. So what happens during the process of disconnection is that the baby elephant is separated very brutally from the mother, ripped away before the training begins and what it means is that they are disconnected from their source of support, the place where they gain their validation, their strength; they turn away from them. So disconnection is the first step.
The second step is limitation and in the process of limitation, the elephant is limited; chains are attached to the feet, sometimes all the four feet, they are made to take very difficult postures and they are forced into those postures for a very long time and they can’t express themselves, they can’t do what they would naturally want to do. Church Gist. They want to sit, they can’t sit. The want to stand, they can’t stand based on the posture that has been imposed on them in the process of limitation.
So there is disconnection, there is limitation and then the third stage is fear that is imposed on them and that’s the most terrible part where they are introduced to all kinds of punishment and sometimes some components are used to hurt them to cause so much harm to them and because they had been disconnected and they are limited and fear is imposed, over time the process becomes very effective, then they become very, very easy to dominate, to control and to instruct.
The good thing is that this very brutal way of training elephant has been outlawed and now there are more inhumane ways of doing them. But I brought this in because I believe that this process is instructive as to how we can be broken. Interestingly, the whole process is called the crushing system, the crushing training where you are crushed, you are broken in order to be controlled and this system that is able to bring down this huge elephant, I believe can also break down people and make them easy to be controlled.
Somebody say; No limit!
So I want you to have this process in mind as I start teaching my message because it is forming the basis, it’s the thesis of my message because I will be coming back to that. So let’s go to the book of Zachariah in the Old Testament, Zachariah 2:1-5.
This is in Chapter 2 of Zachariah but I will just give you a background from chapter 1 because this is the third major vision that Zachariah is seeing. Church Gist. The first two had occurred in chapter 1. In chapter 1, Zachariah saw a vision of a man on a red horse, an angelic being who received report from the earth and the report account is that the earth is resting quietly, Zachariah 1:11. That’s the first thing that the angel talked about, that there is peace, there is quietness. Everything is resting easy, things are going on very well. That’s the first vision of Zachariah. It’s the vision of peace or quietness.
Then the second vision of Zachariah is the vision of four horns that came and scattered God’s people. Church Gist. There is peace, there is scattering, then after the scattering, Zachariah saw in the second vision that God is raising carpenters to bring about a repair, to come and repair what had been scattered. Now these are very important because the vision is painting a picture, its telling us a story.
It starts with peace, scattering and repair. It has to do with Jerusalem dwelling in peace, Jerusalem scattered, Jerusalem repaired and I want you to have this progression in mind as we now deal with the vision in chapter 2. From peace to scattering to repair.
So it is after this that we are reading about the vision that Zachariah saw in chapter 2. Now, if I place Zachariah’s spiritual encounters in context, within the context of COVID, I will also say that our world was at peace, was scattered and there would be a repair, that means after this scattering, after the dislocation, after the disconnection, after all of that, God is going to repair things and I believe that somewhere in our world today, we are between scattering and repair, we are in the repair process and pretty soon, we are going to get out of the repair process and then we have to build and that will be the last, the next phase and that’s where my message would be focused on.
So after the peace, the scattering, the repair, that is when Zachariah saw the vision of the man with the measuring rod in his hand. One of the things that I have noticed is that in a process like this; of peace, scattering, repair, especially with what we going through, there is also a process of conditioning of the mind.
Have you noticed how our minds have been conditioned by limitations in the last one and the half years? I don’t think it was probably as thought as deliberate but it’s definitely an effect. Church Gist. The effect is, we have covered our face, we don’t show our face. The effect is, we have been limited as to the numbers of people we can relate to, the effect is, we are not able to do a lot of things that we would have done. Now all of those things have been done with good intentions to protect us, to keep us alive, to keep us safe. I’m not condemning it, what I’m saying is that the effect of that is that your mind is also being condition to accept a certain reality and part of the reality is, I don’t know about you but has it really occur to you that anytime you see a picture of people, a crowd in a picture, something in your mind tells you, it’s not supposed to be so. For example if you see an old video of a Church service where there is a thousand of people praising God, instantly something in you recoils against it. Something in your is now fighting crowds, large numbers. Everything that comes in volume, your mind in one and half years has been made to reject it and if we don’t deal with that mindset, then in the process of building, after God has repaired and we are now suppose to build, we will place limitations on what we are going to do and that’s where I’m taking message to.
I will read the passage again in Zachariah 1:1-5.
This vision has to do with what happens after there has been peace, scattering, repair and now we are building, how do we approach that phase of our lives and if you look into the vision, the vision opens with Zachariah himself in the vision and he sees himself in the vision and he sees a man with a measuring line in the vision and then he sees an angel with him and then he sees another angel.
So just to illustrate, let’s say this is Zachariah, he is the one seeing the vision; he is the one that God is showing the vision to and then there is an angel and then Zachariah sees a man with a measuring stick or measuring rod in his hand. Church Gist. His job is to go and measure something with the measuring rod. So the man with the measuring rod is asked, where are you going to, not what are you doing or why are you running to but where are you going to. So that question has to do with two things;
Location and direction. Where you are and where you are heading to. The man answered and say, I am going to Jerusalem with my measuring rod.
This man is going to Jerusalem, what is he going to do in Jerusalem. He says I’m going to measure Jerusalem and I’m going to measure Jerusalem to find what is its length and width. What does that mean? Because at this time, Jerusalem has been ransacked and the people have come back to Jerusalem over seventy years later. Church Gist.The walls are broken down, if you remember the story in Nehemiah, the walls are broken down, they want to rebuild Jerusalem, so they are in a building situation after peace, scattering, repair, building and this man with the measuring rod is the builder and he is going to build Jerusalem but he is going to start building by measuring and he’s going to measure the length of Jerusalem and the width of Jerusalem.
How is he going to measure Jerusalem when the walls are broken down? He’s going to measure Jerusalem by measuring the foundations. So if he takes his measuring line, he’s going to discover where things used to be, this is how things used to be. This where the world used to be and then he’s going to measure how wide Jerusalem can be. So he’s measuring two things; the length and the width.
How far can we go after the repair, how far can we build, where is God taking us to, what can we do in the season? It’s a very important question because many of us are in the position of this man with the measuring line after peace, the scattering, the repair, what are we going to build? Where are we going? When we go to Jerusalem, when we get back to our lives, what are going to build, are we going to build with limitation? And that is exactly what this man is going to do, he’s going to build with limitations because he has come from captivity, he has come from bondage, he’s now trying to build but the mindset of a person limited is determining his actions. If we are going to reclaim what God has given to us, we have to be mindful of the mindset, the thought patterns that has been imposed on us throughout this period of restrictions and severe restrictions in our world.
So the man said, I’m going to measure Jerusalem, I’m going to determine the old foundations and logically, it will mean that he will determine two things; can we build up to where the foundation was and if he knows the mindset of the returnees, they came with small minds. In the circumstances that our world is in, I believe we are going to rebuild and I believe God is speaking to us Pastors, men and women of God. There is coming a time of rebuilding but we have to be careful, not to impose limitations on ourselves because God is going to do wonderous works, He is going to do extraordinary works but we have to think extraordinary if we are going to work with God in this season and I believe that this conference prophetically position us for the next phase, the building phase and we don’t go with a measuring line to limit God.
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