If a person helping you with a project hands you a tool that you need to work with, what would be your natural response? Most likely, you'd say "Thank you" and take it.
Well, when the Word of God tells you that God has given you everything you need for life and godliness, how should you respond? Just thank Him for it, and take it!
Aren't you glad God didn't say He was going to give you the tools that you'll need or He might give them to you if you pray hard enough? No, He said He has given you all things that pertain unto life and godliness - that means whatever you need to succeed in life, both naturally and spiritually!
I think too many people try to divorce their natural life from their spiritual life. They put natural things in one category and spiritual things in another. But if you stop to think about it, you are a natural person and a spirit being at the same time, living in a physical body. So it's possible for the natural and the spiritual to work together.
That's why you'll find many of the same principles that make you a success in the natural realm can also work for you in the spiritual realm.
For example, how many successful businessmen do you know who just sit in their office with their feet propped on their desk and have had big business deals automatically fall in their lap? You probably don't know any - because a successful businessman doesn't sit down and wait for business to come to him. He goes out and gets it!
Well, in the same way, the blessings that belong to you in the spiritual realm won't just fall on you like ripe cherries off a tree, as my father would say. You have to take them!
You see, even though Jesus Christ has already won the victory, that doesn't necessarily mean you are reaping the benefits of it. And even though Jesus has given the Church - the called-out ones who have been born again by His precious blood - authority over sickness, poverty and lack, and everything that's contrary to the Word of God, that doesn't mean that you're living in total health and prosperity and enjoying your full redemptive rights!
You have an adversary that wants to steal every promise of God away from you that he can. He'll try to trick you into sitting around on the pew or in your home, never doing anything because you're "waiting on the Lord."
The devil will try to deceive you into believing that love, joy, peace, and happiness will be yours in the "Sweet By-and-by." But what good is it to look toward Heaven to enjoy the blessings of God when you're alive down here now? No, you need a little bit of Heaven now to go to Heaven with!
Don't misunderstand me. I thank God for the future and the glorious hope that we have in Christ. But now is when we need food on our tables and clothes on our bodies, not when we get to Heaven.
We need to be able to give people God's Word of hope and encouragement right now - when the world is going through an energy crisis, an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, and every other kind of crisis you can think of!
So I want to encourage you. Don't just sit idly by and allow the enemy to steal what rightfully belongs to you. Raise the bloodstained banner of the Lord Jesus Christ in your life! Wave it in front of the enemy, and let him know that you know Jesus Christ has already defeated him.
Friend, God has already given you everything you need to make it in this life. So get up, reach out with your faith, and take what God says is yours now!
Excerpt permission granted by Faith Library Publications