You Have Been Delivered
“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you” (Col 1:9a, NIV).
Listen to this prayer. It is the prayer that the Holy Spirit prayed for you and me “that ye might be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” The word translated knowledge here, is more than simply knowledge. It is exact knowledge. It is Spirit-revealed knowledge that gives spiritual wisdom and understanding. This kind of wisdom is from above and not a product of head or sense knowledge. Wisdom from purely intellectual knowledge cannot fathom this. This is the kind of knowledge given to us by the Spirit, while the veil is removed, to perceive the purpose of the Father who dwells in the Holiest of All.
The objective of this knowledge is that we “might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness;” (Col 1:10,11). The Lord Jesus is the Vine, we are the branches. We are the fruit-bearing part of Christ. Christ’s fruit of good work is to be borne by us, He is no longer here and cannot bear fruit by Himself now. “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good…”(Act 10:38). We are to bear fruit and continue His ministry of ‘doing good’.
The prayer continues by asking God that as He fills us with the perfect knowledge of His will, we would be “strengthened with all of his ability according to the might of his glory unto all steadfastness and all longsuffering with joy.”
“Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:”(Col1 1:12).
First, we should always give thanks to the Father who has qualified us, or made us worthy, to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. We did not meet the requirements based on our own merits. God, by grace, gave us the qualifying grade. But the grace was not free, Christ paid for it and inputted it into our accounts.
Delivered from the Dominion of Darkness
“Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son. In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins”(Col 1:13-14).
God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness. If you have received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you have been delivered from the lordship and dominion of the evil one. Neither sin nor Satan can lord it over you any longer unless you let them. You are no longer under the kingdom of darkness; you are a partaker of the kingdom of light and you have inheritance rights with the children of God. You have a new spirit in you, the old is gone, and all is become new. A miraculous work of new creation has been performed in you.
Now that you have been delivered from the dominion of darkness, you must begin to walk in the newness of life into which you’ve been transformed. Do not let the enemy through subtlety deceive you into looking back and subjecting yourself to the old bondage from which you’ve been delivered.
My prayer is that the Spirit of Truth will grant everyone reading these lines a complete revelation of their total liberation from the power of darkness and the reality of being translated into the Kingdom of God.
Deliverance from the House of Bondage
“And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;
And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites”(Exo 3:7-8) .
This was God’s commissioning statement to Moses when He called him at the burning bush to send him to Pharaoh to request the release of His people. Moses had fled Egypt forty years earlier, wanted for killing an Egyptian. At that time he had known that God would somehow use him to deliver his people from Egyptian bondage. But when he became a fugitive, wanted for murder by Pharaoh, and his own people did not recognize him as a possible leader, he gave up that idea and fled. That was forty years ago.
Yes, Moses was well-bred, well-educated as a prince in the house of Pharaoh, but he was not ready to lead God’s people. As a prince of Egypt, he had all the learning of the world of his day, but that was in no way sufficient to equip him to lead God’s people. And as it was with Moses, so it is with us today. All the wisdom and knowledge that men acquire in institutions of learning today cannot equip them for ministering the things of God. This is because the natural man, by natural knowledge, cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God
Although Moses was learned in the wisdom of his day, he was not yet capable to deliver God’s people. He had not yet gone through God’s boot camp at the backside of the desert. Considering his upbringing and quality training in Pharaoh’s palace, he thought he was ready and the time was ripe for him to deliver his people, but he was running ahead of God—in fact, he was forty years too early. He, like many ministers in the West today, he did not know that God never depends on the arm of flesh to help Him bring deliverance or salvation to his people. No nation, and definitely no man has the ability to deliver himself, much less someone else.
This may come as a shock to you, but God is not depending on your education, intelligence, or billion-dollar power to bring deliverance to His people anytime or anywhere. He is not depending on your political party to move His gospel forward. “It is not by power nor by might but by my Spirit says the Lord” (Zech 4:6).
The Lord is trying to make it abundantly clear to us through the life of Moses that the deliverance of His people and the nations of the world is going to come from Him. It is all of Him and by Him. We are going to be used as instruments in the deliverance of God’s people, but we must understand that it is by His Spirit and not by the reason of our education, wealth, or political influence. It is important to remember that Moses was a prince in Egypt. He was the adopted son of a queen, and at 40 years old, he was the man who would be king and wielded great political power in the court of Pharaoh. Moses knew the kind of power that he had, and he knew that God had chosen him as the instrument to bring deliverance to his people. But he did not understand that God does not save by sword or spear, but by His Spirit.
God orchestrated the incident that drove him out of Egypt to the Midianites desert to teach him (and us) that He does not depend on man’s ability and political position to deliver his people. We, in this present generation, must ponder on this. May the Lord God grant us understanding in these things.
So, after completing the first of the three phases of his life, each forty years in length, Moses left Egypt, according to the plan of God, and went into the desert of Midian to be trained for the ministry ahead of him. He had to go there to learn a different lesson. It was part of the “making of the man of God.”
Out of the king’s palace to the desert; there Moses would learn the art of being a shepherd. There he would learn brokenness and lose the superman-superpower attitude he acquired from his upbringing in the palace. There he would become weak, empty, and less self-reliant than he once was. And then, in his emptiness, God would fill him, and in his weakness, the Almighty would become the strength of his life. It was this transformation that would make Moses into a man of God, ready to be sent to Egypt to be a co-laborer with God in the deliverance of His people Israel.
“And when forty years were expired, there appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush. When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight: and as he drew near to behold it, the voice of the Lord came unto him,
Saying, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Then Moses trembled, and durst not behold. Then said the Lord to him, Put off thy shoes from thy feet: for the place where thou standest is holy ground” (Act 7:30-33).
This was forty-years later and Moses’ wilderness training at the backside of the Midianite’s desert was complete. He had spent those years keeping the flock of Jethro and learning the way of a shepherd. He had become empty of self and was a completely changed man. It was at this point that the angel of God appeared to him in the burning bush. Moses had gone through the school of patience and become as meek as any man could be. He was now ready to begin the next phase of his ministry—becoming an instrument of deliverance for the children of Israel.
“Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! When God bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad” (Psa 53:6).
My friend, look up unto the Lord, and He will deliver you from all your troubles. Do not trust in man, neither in any government or nation, put your trust in God. Join David who said,
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psa 121:1-8).