A PASTOR OF A LARGE CHURCH TOLD ME, “IF I TEACH FOR TOO LONG, MY CHURCH WILL GO DOWN. I WILL NEED TO STIR IT UP, FAST, FAST.”
I UNDERSTAND THE TERRAIN WHERE HE PASTORS BECAUSE IF YOU HAVE NOT BEEN RAISED THAT WAY TO BE ROOTED, YOU WILL BE GOING UP AND DOWN LOOKING FOR WHAT IS NOT LOST.
IF YOU WANT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN EVERY SINGLE TIME WHEN GOD IS NOT SENDING YOU, THAT IS WHEN YOU WILL BE PART OF THOSE WHO FAKE MIRACLES.
IF YOU ARE HEARING ME FOR THE FIRST TIME, YOU MAY THINK THERE ARE NO SIGNS IN THIS CHURCH.
THERE ARE ENOUGH SIGNS AND WONDERS THAT IF WE START PROJECTING THEM, THE TAPES WILL NOT TAKE THEM. BUT NOTHING SURVIVES BEING ON THE SURFACE.
GOD DOES NOT WANT SURFACE CHRISTIANS. IF YOU WANT TO BE FRUITFUL, YOU MUST BE ROOTED.
THE REASON WE HAVE A LOT OF CHURCHES IN THE 21ST CENTURY AND WE DON’T HAVE A LOT OF RESULTS IN THE PERSONAL LIVES OF CHRISTIANS IS BECAUSE MOST CHRISTIANS ARE NOT ROOTED.
WHEN GOD SEES THE EARTH, HE SEES US LIKE TREES. WHEN GOD WANTS YOU TO EXPLODE AND INCREASE YOUR VALUE, HE STARTS TO PLANT YOU.
WHEN YOU ARE DRAWING ROOTS DOWNWARDS, PEOPLE WILL START GOSSIPING ABOUT YOU, BECAUSE THE devil WANTS YOU TO HEAR VOICES OF DISCOURAGEMENT.
-Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo
COZA 12 Days of Glory 2022
Evening Session, Day 5
Please clap for all the campuses watching: Ilorin, Port Harcourt and from Dubai.
I celebrate you, God will honour you. Alright, I know we have a lot of new people around and I celebrate you, but please when the Word is going on in COZA, we honour the Lord: let’s be seated, it won’t take long. Let’s be seated and let’s receive from the Lord. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit. Church Gist. Let’s receive with meekness.
Isaiah 37:31 (NKJV)
“And the remnant who have escaped of the House of Judah”: In the Hebrew, this is Yadah; who have escaped, who are part of praise.
Balaam could not curse the people of Israel and Balak asked, “with all the titles I wanted to give to you, why won’t you curse them?” He said there are 2 things in their midst: iniquity is not found in their midst and the shout of the King is in their midst.
The remnant: no matter what the enemy had done to Israel, to covenant people, a remnant would escape and those who have escaped were at the House of Praise and the Bible says, “they shall again…” Let me stop there and quickly prophesy to you.
-No matter what you have lost, it will come again.
-No matter what the adversary touched, it will come again.
-No matter the plot of the adversary for you and he thought, ‘what I have done, there is a full stop here’, Heaven changes it to a comma.
They shall again take root downwards and the reason they are going to take root downward is because they are about to bear fruit upwards.
-I prophesy to you, you are bearing fruits this year.
This is our deliberation tonight. From the 31st of December last year (2021), God said to us, “this year 2022, we are living in God’s best.” No matter where you are, no matter what you have encountered, no matter what you are dealing with, God says, “there is a place ahead of you called there.”
There is not all there is about you. Never put a full stop behind the exploits of the devil in anybody’s life.
John 10:10
“The thief comes to steal, to kill and to destroy.” There was a full stop, ‘But’ came after it.
“But I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”
John 10:10 (AMP)
Where you are is not the best yet. Now we don’t complain, we are grateful.
Hebrews 13:6 (NKJV) – We are content, we are grateful but we aspire for more.
I gave an example and I will like to reiterate it. Church Gist. My Secondary and my Primary School was in University of Ilorin and my Mum worked there. Even after driving hours to the school, at the end of the school, I will drive another few minutes to get to my Mum’s office. The place was much on the outskirts that it looked as if it was the end of the world. As the driver was driving me to school, I would think if I drove there, that would be the end of the world. Then I drove there, the end of the world had shifted. That thing that you are seeing, that looks like it touches the ground is called the horizon.
Every single day of your life, God wants you to see new horizons. The devil wants to think the best is behind you:
“Oh you know, don’t be smiling too much ooo. Remember you lost some things. Remember what happened last year. Remember what happened to you 10 years ago.”
He wants to be telling you about your past and you know what is happening, the past I am talking about is not only bad things. Sometimes successes. You can rest on your oars and say, “we are the first to start it.”
When you see people telling you, “that person, he has a name now. In those days, he used to come here to beg.” If you see people with such stories, they have not moved forward. There is nobody in this Church, if I meet you in your office, no matter your history that I know, even if I helped you to start, I helped you to succeed, I am going to honour you in front of people.
It will never happen that you give me a microphone, then I will call you by your first name, when everybody is honouring you. Church Gist. Those are low life mentalities.
If you have said it in one year, 3 times, “I am not your mate.” You know why you are saying it: You have not achieved much. So it is that age that you are using to brag.
-But from today, you are stepping into God’s best.
To bear fruits is not about imagining that you will bear fruits. Born losers, I don’t believe in it, but that is what motivational speakers say, I don’t believe anybody was born to lose. But born losers, the motivational speaker says, “they weep in their fantasy, in their minds.” You see that unsuccessful person you know and age has gone and it looks as if it is over, that person when they were young like you, they had aspirations. It is your choices that actually effect your chances. Church Gist. Your choices can either make you or break you. So the things you are doing today is actually affecting, it may not show today.
Yorubas say that a young boy abuses the Oak tree because they defiled the Oak tree in Yoruba parlance. He abuses the Oak tree and tells his friend, “nothing happened to me.” He doesn’t know that the day you abused the Oak tree, that is not the day the spirit inside it affects you.
So it is not the day you do what you are doing that you will see results.
-You will not regret at the end of your life.
Proverbs 4:18
-Your end will be better than your beginning.
-Tap your neighbour, “this is not the best about me.” Say to your neighbour, “the best is yet to come and I am embracing the best right now.”
Colossians 2:6-7 (NKJV)
How should we walk? Rooted
What an oxymoron! How do you get rooted and be walking? He is not talking about physical walk. He is talking about your walk with the Lord. God does not want surface Christians and I will show you some examples. Church Gist. If you want to be fruitful, you want to be perennial, you want to be consistent. You want me to come back at where you are and meet you more luscious in the next 10 years, you must be rooted. This is the reason we have a lot of Churches in the 21st century and we don’t have a lot of results in the lives of private, personal Christian lives because most Christians are not rooted.
A Pastor that I respect and love so much said something to me. He said, “Pastor Biodun, I admire how you are anointed, but you teach and you are disciplined.”
I say this to you and I lie not, anytime I want to pray for the sick in the Church and we are going to see miracles, I don’t plan it. That is why you will hear just at the end of this Service, “Pastor said this.” God just told me, “I want to do this.” If you want to make it happen every single time when God is not sending you, that is when you will be part of those who fake miracles.
He is a Pastor of a large Church, I respect him so much. He said it to me, probably because he trusted me. He said, “Pastor Biodun, if I teach for too long, my Church will go down. I will need to stir it up, fast, fast.” Church Gist. I understand the terrain where he pastors because if you have not been raised that way to be rooted, you will be going up and down looking for what is not lost.
If I talk now, you may think maybe there are no signs in our Church, if you are hearing me for the first time. Enough signs and wonders that if we start projecting them, the tapes will not take them. But nothing survives being on the surface.
Jesus was in a certain house, one was rooted, one was on the surface. If you saw the two of them, you would think they are both rooted. Martha was serving, going up and down: the best bedsheet, the best water, the best food. Everything was in place. But Mary sat at his feet. I love Mary, she didn’t gossip about it. She (Martha) went to Jesus, “are you not bothered that I, the older sister, I am serving? I own this house. Mary has connected with you and she is just sitting down there, not serving.”
Jesus said, “it is good to serve but one thing she has chosen which is the best part, to listen, to hearken, to be rooted, to be grounded.”
Luke 10:38-42
Lazarus was their brother, somebody who was dead for 4 days. Jesus got there and raised him back to life. Who should follow him the most? Who should be more grateful?
I want to ask you a question, “Where was Lazarus at the cross? Where was Martha at the cross?”
Who was by the tomb, who will not leave? Mary, the one that was rooted.
I am telling you the truth, there are things that look like, okay it is trending, that looks like it is popular, that looks like this is it. There are lots of things that people are running for miracles that they will not even need miracle. My father-in-law told me, “listen, as I am walking, sickness is dropping. As I am doing things for God, it is dropping.”
Did you know that once when they crossed Jordan into the Promised land, Manna ceased! What were they encountering? Blessing.
Somebody stood at the junction, was asking for a bag of corn, “I am hungry.” People bypassed him, went to sow seeds in their farm, planted, weeded. They were coming back, 3 months’ time.
“I need…” One of them said, “Is not that hard. Take a bag.” He went to Church sharing, “I got a bag”, when somebody has a farm by following principles. There are a lot of things you need to shift your mind about in 2022, if you want to see the fullness. You see that guy had a provision from God, the guy that got a sack of maize but that was not God’s best for him.
You know the meaning of Manna? It means ‘what is this?’ That what was they ate in the morning, afternoon and night. It is a miracle, we thank God for it, but you couldn’t fry it, you couldn’t boil it. The same way you ate it for 40 years. The same way, the same expectation. But they squeezed orange in the promised land, it dropped on the floor, it became something else. They could have orange juice, they could mix it with water melon. That is what blessings do.
Do you know that healing is not really for Christians? Health is for Christians. Healing is an advert to draw unbelievers in. Church Gist. When you are drawn in, you are supposed to walk in health. I was studying many years ago, how God made the children of Israel walk in health: He (God) controlled their food, He controlled their water and controlled their exercise.
You are a Christian, you don’t exercise. Everything is not gym. My wife will rather go by the stairs than to enter the lift. Yesterday I was making a joke, “with her, she would say, let’s walk.” I said, in this …every waka I don waka. Some people eat anything. I want to talk about eating, everybody agrees that we should eat right. Some take Fanta (in the) morning, Fanta afternoon, Fanta night. When they want to now eat food, they eat donut.
When I turned 38, my body shifted. The things I used to do. My body began to talk to me. I was binding, I was fasting, I was doing everything. One day, God just spoke to me. You said you have a friend that is 50 years old, talk to him. So I called the guy, I said, “did this happen to you? This is happening to me.”
He laughed, “Pastor Biodun, I will go to healing meetings like this, people would be healed, but after the Service they will carry me to the office, I will doing like this. One day, the Holy Ghost told me, get up, you don’t know how to eat.” I looked around, “who spoke?” He began to teach him principles. He went and spoke to Benny Hinn and Benny Hinn introduced him to his doctor, a nutritionist.
I am aware, I am not sure, that everywhere Kenneth Copeland goes, he goes with his nutritionist. He doesn’t eat just anything. God called him and said, “could you please prove to humanity that I can make people live up to 120 years. Will you help Me to do this?” Control this, control this.
We just blame God for everything. There are principles that guard the blessing.
The remnant will need to draw down. You want to explode, you go out.
1 Samuel 30
“They have taken your children, they have taken everything”: David instead of running out, he had fought over 50 battles, he did not lose one. He should have come out to say, “Yes, I am a War Lord.”
You know what David did, instead of running out, he ran inside, took the ephod, “Lord, what should I do?” He took root downwards.
In 2022, don’t be ignorant and sending the Holy Ghost on errand: Angels go, Holy Ghost move.
Holy Ghost says, “I want to go but I also want to talk to you before I go.”
What is He saying to you? He that has an ear. Are you listening to what the Spirit is saying to the Church or what the world is saying to the Church? What are you listening to?
It is time to draw roots downwards.
You see when you are drawing roots downwards, people will start gossiping about you, because the devil wants you to hear voices of discouragement. Church Gist. When you are taking roots downwards, people will start speaking to you, “Is that how it is done? First 12 days of the year, instead of you to roll your sleeves and hustle and do well. You are going to Church every day! ‘Na prayer we go chop?’
I don’t know if I have shown you something before. I think I have shown you many times.
1 Corinthians 2:14 (NKJV)
The natural man is someone who is not born again. There are some arguments you should not be doing in your office. He doesn’t have the capacity. Even you did not have the capacity. You were growing, but you did not know. Before you could receive these things properly on your inside, it took a while.
1 Corinthians 2:14 (AMPC)
He may be a deacon in Church, but in his heart of hearts, he doesn’t agree to the things of the Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit, the teachings and revelations of the Spirit of God.
Why? It is not his fault. They are foolishness, they are meaningless.
When they are laughing at you, they are not trying to mock you, it doesn’t make sense to them. If it could make sense to them, then they don’t need to be born again. Then they would have broken scriptures. Some that are pretending that it makes sense to them, they just want to be your friends. It doesn’t really enter their hearts.
When you are taking roots downwards, there are people that will mock you. If you are a singer and God tells you, “shut down for 2 months”: they will say, we are not hearing about him again. Some people think trending on social media is real life. It is good to trend, I am not saying it is not good to trend, but some people think that is where the Word is. That is not where the Word is, it is when God is with you. One with God, if God be for you, nothing can be against you and survive it.
Look at your neighbour and say, “I am taking my root downwards.”
Colossians 2:6,7 (AMPC) – It is something you ought to meditate on tomorrow.
You must be planted. Why will God say we must be planted?
Psalm 1:1-3
God did not compare us with many things, but God has compared us with trees. So you go study trees, you can understand who you are
It seems to me like God when He sees men, He sees men as trees. There was a man that Jesus held his hand, took him out of the city before praying for him. When He took out of the city and healed him, the first thing He did when He laid hands on him, the man began to see the way God sees.
Jesus said, “what do you see?”
He said, “I see men as trees walking”
Jesus said: Ohh, I am sorry. I need to change your perspective to the perspective of man. Oh you are seeing like God. He laid hands on him again and began to see men as men.
Mark 8:22-25
When God sees the earth, He sees us like trees and I am going to be bringing out principles to let you understand what God does with an individual. When God wants you to explode, He wants to increase your value, He starts to plant you – Isaiah 61:1-3 (NKJV)
Trees don’t plant themselves. When you see a tree of righteousness, ‘I planted that tree.” If that tree will survive and be luscious and bring fruits out, that tree will need to deal with the issue of roots. Church Gist. You don’t destroy a tree by cutting the branches. When you have not tampered with the roots, that tree will blossom again.
The Bible says, “if a tree be cut down, will it not blossom again?”
-I prophesy to you, if anybody has been cut down here, it is time. 2022 is the time, the season and the year to blossom again.
-You are blossoming again.
-Your marriage is blossoming again.
-Everything that concerns you is blossoming again.
-All your friends that gathered, to prophesy against how you will end this year, they are the ones that will be disgraced.
-Those that are waiting for your fall, will wait forever.
Somebody say, “roots”; somebody say, “fruits.”
There are two things critical about a tree: the roots and the fruits. Jesus looked at a tree that didn’t bear fruits and He said, “be cut down in the spirit.” The roots and the fruits, very important.
But can we go deeper? You will see that one is visible, the other is invisible. The fruit is visible. When you see a tree with fruits, you will see birds there, there will be leaves there. It has to be luscious and big. Everybody respects the tree. Do you know there are some compounds, you cannot climb their tree? They will use catapult to bring you down. If it is a barren tree, you climb it, it is your business. Some families when they are broke and they have a tree that is fruitful in their family, it can sustain them. They can sell the fruits, they can survive on the fruits.
What happens to Christians is that all of us, we pay attention to fruits. We don’t know the reason why there is a visible glory is because of the invisible glory in the ground.
Somebody say, “roots”; somebody say, “fruits.”
The root is the cause of the fruits. Fruitlessness is not a function of what is happening on your outside, fruitlessness is a function of what is happening in the invisible.
I left school because the cult boys were fighting, I was a Christian. They wanted to write an exam for those who just started discipleship course in my fellowship. I had just given my life to Christ. I went to Sister Uche who was my Discipleship Director. I said, “please are they going to ask us to write scriptures or we will just answer?”
She said, “they will ask you to write scriptures.” I did not know one scripture. I said, “Sister Uche, my case should be different.” I wanted to join the workforce and you had to write the exams to join the workforce.
I said: Sister Uche, please I don’t know any scripture, please. Can you please find a way to set my exams for me, I want to join the workforce?
She said, “No, we can’t do that here.”
In school that afternoon, the cult boys started fighting, they said, “everybody go home.”
I said: Thank You Jesus. As I entered the taxi and I remember like yesterday. As I crossed the Onitsha bridge into Asaba, I told myself, when I am coming back to cross this bridge, I will not remain the same again.
I got home. 6 am, my alarm will wake me up, to pray and then to study.
9 am: To pray, to study.
12 noon: To pray, to study
Every 3 hours through out the holiday. After a while, my fiancée. After a while, my younger brother joined me. Did you know what happened? A lot of people joined us, doing that from time to time. I remember some of my cousins that are here, their father came to our house and said, “is there a Muslim praying upstairs?” because of my tongues. I was singing in tongues and the man said, “are they calling Muslim prayers here?” I was probably sounding like an Arab. I remember.
You know what happened to my father’s finance? I don’t want to tell you the whole story of the state. This man had been buried alive, bound politically, seized his passport, did everything. We were not even praying about him. After like 2 weeks, somebody if I mention his name, you will not believe, everybody talks badly about him. He just sent for my Dad and loaded him. Before we knew what was happening, my father became a Chairman of a Party. My house began to blossom again. The man was on top.
I said, “What is going on here?” I was not praying about him, all of us were not praying about him. It was just consistency, taking root downwards to bear fruits upwards.
If all you are bothered about is “I need a car, I want to get married this year.” They are good, because if you have not gone through those things, you will not know how down people are. But you must learn how to look away from the fruits and pay attention to the root.
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