8 minute read
Respect Your GodConnections
by Keith Moore
God never planned for believers to be lone wolves. None of us have all the anointings we need for navigating through life. God intended for us to appreciate the giftings in each other.
It was not by chance that you heard the gospel. It wasn’t even by chance that you heard it from the specific person you did. That was a God-connection, and having walked with the Lord for many years, I can attest to God-connections being so, so important.
I was saved at a little Baptist church in Mississippi. Praise God for those precious people. They were part of my and my wife’s faith journey. None of our time together was an accident. They were God-connections, pure and simple.
And it wasn’t an accident that someone gave us a cassette tape of a message by Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. We’ll never forget it. Phyllis and I took that message into our little mobile home with its shag carpet and plastic couch, and we listened. My, how our spirits leapt! Redeemed from the curse of the law? We’ve never heard anything like this! It was through Kenneth Copeland Ministries and those teachings that we were first introduced to Kenneth E. Hagin. That God-connection set the course of Moore Life Ministries and Faith Life Church.
God-connections are precious for all believers. But the enemy is out to sever them. He wants to stop the combining of anointings that cause something bigger to happen than what we can achieve on our own. We must make up our minds to keep that from happening and instead honor what God has done.
Man-Joined Versus God-Joined
Mark 10:9 says, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Yes, Jesus was talking about marriage, but the principle of being God-joined versus manjoined is the same. There’s a temptation to join ourselves to people and things that God didn’t put together.
Second Chronicles 20 provides an example of this.
Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, joined himself with Ahaziah, the wicked king of Israel:
And he joined himself with him to make ships to go to Tarshish: and they made the ships in Eziongaber. Then Eliezer the son of Dodavah of Mareshah prophesied against Jehoshaphat, saying, Because thou hast joined thyself with Ahaziah, the LORD hath broken thy works. And the ships were broken, that they were not able to go to Tarshish (verses 36-37).
Jehoshaphat had joined with an ungodly king, something God didn’t ordain, and the results were devastating. God wasn’t in it, so it didn’t succeed.
We see the same principle in the parable of the prodigal son. The story tells us of a young man who took his portion of inheritance and squandered it on riotous living. When he was out of money, Luke 15:15 says, “He went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.” The story’s lesson was that God hadn’t planned for that young man to even be there, much less go through all of that. The young man had made the decision to join himself to someone outside of God’s best.
There’s a difference between being manjoined and God-joined. Man-joined is not blessed. God-joined is! What God joins together should be honored and protected because it’s powerful.
When We Come Together
God never planned for believers to be lone wolves. None of us have all the anointings we need for navigating through life. God intended for us to appreciate the giftings in each other. Many times, I have been in meetings when the Spirit of God moved, my brothers and sisters in Christ yielded to the Spirit, and their anointings manifested. It was beautiful and without each of them there, it wouldn’t have been possible.
None of us will ever produce that kind of corporate anointing on our own. Never, no matter how much we pray or fast. The enemy knows this, and he fears it. That’s why when we resist the devil in faith and stand on our authority in Christ, the anointing manifests and the enemy flees.
The devil is always working to instigate some kind of strife and division in the Body of Christ. His greatest nightmare is when believers unite in faith, because when we quit trying to build our individual kingdoms and instead pool our resources and faith, nothing that God has told us can be kept from us.
Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good.…” Many people stop reading that verse right there, but that’s not all it says. Paul was talking to a specific group of people. He finished by saying, “to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
Does everybody love God? No, a lot of people hate God. Is everything working for their good? No, the promise isn’t for them. It’s for us, those whom He loved and called.
Prospering Together
Two months after I was accepted into Rhema Bible Training College in Broken Arrow, Okla., the Lord gave me three words: Help Brother Hagin. I thought I’d be there a year, but those three words were my ministry directive for the next 20 years! Brother Hagin didn’t know me personally. There were thousands of students on the campus. I didn’t know how to help him, but whenever the school or church asked for volunteers, I signed up.
Every time they said, “We need this,” I’d think, Brother Hagin needs help.
One thing led to another and eventually the leaders let me help in Healing School. Then they asked me to teach at the school. I felt so inadequate. I didn’t have a lot of higher education, so I started reading big theology books to prepare. I needed a dictionary just to get through them. Still, that didn’t set well with me. I was paddling upstream and getting more frustrated.
When I finally started seeking the Lord, He spoke to my heart and said, Keith, I have many good ministries all over this world. I could have sent you to any one of those. I sent you here. Get this.
Those final two words, Get this, rang in my ears. I went back to basics. I put the big theology books away and got out Brother Hagin’s book What Faith Is.
That taught me a valuable lesson: We are limited in our time, scope and contacts. If we try to do things He didn’t direct and connect us to, we’ll spread ourselves too thin. Instead, we each need to focus on what we personally are supposed to be doing, and connect with other believers who we can come alongside.
That’s what God provided for Lot when He connected him with Abram (Genesis 12: 1-4). Together, the two prospered. Genesis 13 tells us they had so much that the land wasn’t able to bear them. Lot was blessed with the same things that Abram had because he had connected to his uncle.
Remember and Appreciate
The Lord made it clear to me that He blesses God-connections when He connected me with KCM. He said, Kenneth Copeland Ministries has an abundance of resources, and they’re reaching multiple countries.
In the beginning, when we first connected with KCM, our ministry couldn’t afford to buy a TV for our house, let alone equipment for a TV studio. We were using our faith just to get a used car. Believing for an airplane hadn’t even crossed our minds.
Today our ministry has its own television studios. We’re part of KCM’s VICTORY Channel and other networks. We have our own aviation department and fly internationally. Why did all this happen? God connected us to Kenneth Copeland Ministries. That connection helped us reach people and fulfill what God called us to do.
We refuse to let our connection with this ministry to be severed.
That’s what eventually happened with Lot and Abram. Genesis 13:8 says, “And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren.”
Lot didn’t know that when he separated from Abram, he moved away from his protection. It was only the mercy of God that he and his daughters were saved out of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24-25). But even that didn’t save him. He ended up losing everything—his family, his honor and his prosperity—when he severed what God had joined him to.
The Bible says, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth” (Isaiah 52:7)!
We must remember and appreciate those who first preached the gospel to us, those who have invested in us, those who helped us grow and mature, and those who made it possible for us to fulfill what God has called us to. They are our God-connections, not chance encounters. God ordained and blessed them, and what “God has joined together, let not man put asunder!”
When we quit trying to build our individual kingdoms and instead pool our resources and faith, nothing that God has told us can be kept from us.
