David Hathaway

When you are a child of God, when you are walking in the Will and knowledge of God, many things which happen in your life – some of which may be painful now – are like an instruction, a teaching, to prepare you for the future! In Isaiah 30v20, ‘Although the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction…’ I’m sensing, that although your life’s experience will be of adversity and affliction, yet they will become the very thing which God will use for His glory. When I look back on my life and my 70 years of ministry, it is very clear to me that in order to come to where I am today, the Lord had to take me through adversity. I would not be where I am, seeing the power of the evangelism and the phenomenal miracles unless I had had cancer twice and been in prison.

There is One Body, One Spirit, One Hope, One Faith… We know this from Ephesians 4… One Lord, One Baptism, One God and Father of all… There is such a sense of Oneness in Christ! The Church is not just a place where Christians gather together, the Church is fellowship, it’s unity, the place where we get our strength, our power, it’s like a school, it’s where we get our education… The purpose of the Church is to strengthen the work of the ministry.

It’s a very beautiful thing the Apostle Paul is saying in Ephesians 3:17-19, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length and depth and height of the love of God.”  This is really beautiful, it’s Paul being very expressive and very explicit. We’re so familiar with two dimensions, flat, and with three dimensions where there is some depth and perspective. But Paul’s description of the love of God is higher and greater, more enlightening, it’s wide, it’s long, it’s deep, and it’s high – four dimensions – the height AND the depth! I’m intrigued! God’s love is not just the length which encompasses the world, it’s not just the width, but it has a height – and it has a depth – it’s an almost unfathomable mystery of God. And yet Paul wants us to understand it.

We are held by love, an invisible power that doesn’t let us escape out of the Grace of God! Oh, what a wonderful description of being a ‘prisoner of God’. We are held ‘captive’ to His Love… It so binds us, so holds us… But it’s not only God’s Love for us, but our love for Him! Our love for Him acts as a lock, a guard, to prevent us from getting away! So, you and I, we’re a ‘prisoner’ of the Lord! Not in the sense of pain and suffering, but something full of Glory, full of joy! I follow the Lord because I love Him! I preach the Gospel – because I love Him! I see the miracles – because I love Him! My whole life is governed by love. Love is surely one of the most powerful forces!

Let the faith of God come into YOU in such a way that YOU can expect MORE! Not less. With God, it’s not a partial fulfilment, it’s ABOVE what we can think! God is not only able to answer your prayers, whatever they are, but whatever you ask for, He is willing to give you MORE! And it is for His GLORY!

What is your ministry? The purpose of the Church is that the manifold wisdom of God be made known to the ‘principalities and powers in the heavenly places’! In other words, that the great wisdom of God might not just be revealed to the unbeliever, but to the rulers and authorities in ‘heavenly places’. Paul is revealing in the book of Ephesians that we have to demonstrate the Wisdom, Power and Glory of God, not only on the earth, but to those ‘other powers’, those ‘heavenly powers’, those other spiritual powers. By ‘heavenly’, Paul is not meaning ‘Heaven’, but unearthly, ungodly. Paul writes later in this letter, ‘We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ These are the powers that you and I must not only to wrestle with, but be witnesses to! We have to witness, through our faith in Christ, through our lives, through the way we live, the Power of God to the devil!  

You are an heir and partaker of all the promises of Christ! We are familiar with this revelation of the mystery of Christ, but it was not so in Paul’s day – the revelation that Gentiles are fellow-heirs with Jews, part of the same Body, and partakers of the same Promises in Christ through the Gospel, was absolutely new, vv5-6. Gentiles – fellow-heirs with the Jews! The same Body as the Jews! Partakers with the Jews of the Promises in Christ which are revealed through the Gospel! Of which Paul was made a minister, by a gift of Grace, given him by the effectual working of God’s Power, v7! The gift that made Paul a minister of the Gospel to the Gentiles was a gift given from God through the working of the Holy Spirit.

For by Grace we are saved through faith and not of ourselves, a Gift of God, not of works, so that we cannot boast. Our salvation is by faith alone, nothing else. SAVED by FAITH. Not by religious observance, tradition or any ordinances of the Church, or by what we have done. We are SAVED by FAITH IN CHRIST! We receive salvation as a free gift! A GIFT! And like every gift, you can accept or refuse. It’s SO SIMPLE. Salvation is GIVEN to us! A GIFT from GOD OUR FATHER, and we receive it THROUGH CHRIST!

By faith, God has resurrected us by grace, TOGETHER WITH CHRIST! The Apostle Paul is quite clear that we are new creations in Christ. Water baptism by full immersions is symbolic of this. Paul says, we are buried with Christ in the water of baptism, and we come up out of the water as a symbol of recreation, resurrection, and new birth.

Enter into the Power and the Glory of God! Because we are in Christ, seated in the Heavenly Places in Christ, ALL THAT POWER AND GLORY – that Paul describes to us here in Ephesians Chapter 1 – is ours! It’s in the Church! You are His Hands, His Feet, His Eyes, His Mouth – YOU are the only manifestation of Jesus that the people on earth can ever see! And they HAVE to see that Glory in YOU! The Inheritance, the Glory – is in Christ, in Heaven. 

Jesus is interceding for us. NOW! God the Father has EXALTED Christ above everything – given Him the Highest Name, the Highest Place, the Greatest Power – ALL this God has put in Christ when He exalted Him – AND THAT IS OUR INHERITANCE! People ask me to pray for them, and of course I do, if you are sick, if you have a need, I pray for you, as Paul also did. But the GREATEST Intercessor is Jesus Himself. He’s in the Presence of the Father, at the Right Hand of the Father – praying for YOU!

My earnest desire is that you receive a Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation, that the eyes of your understanding be enlightened, that you may KNOW what is the Hope of God’s Calling and what the riches of the Glory of His Inheritance in the Saints. The Apostle Paul prays in Ephesians 1 that the eyes of our understanding would be enlightened, opened – to receive this REVELATION! Unless you receive the Holy Spirit, you can never fully comprehend who Jesus is, and all that He means to us! That you might KNOW what the Hope of His Calling is. He has called us, chosen us. Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, I have chosen you and ordained you that you would bring forth fruit, and that your fruit would remain.” John 15:16. We are called of God!

Look beyond your suffering, your sickness, your pain, beyond the weakness of the flesh. I want you to begin to live in anticipation of the Glory that is to come. When I came out of that communist prison with my experience in there of the Glory, I knew that there is something far more than anything the world can offer. Everything the world can offer is transient, it lasts for a time and then it’s gone. Our hope transcends, comes above all our earthly panic and pain!

God chose us in Christ, before the foundation of the world! We have to understand the foreknowledge of God! BEFORE we were born, when we were in our mother’s womb, God foreordained a plan and a purpose for our lives! That we should be ‘holy and without blame before Him in love’! We live one day at a time, yet God sees all our days. I cannot over-emphasise the peace that I have, and the peace that you should have - and this peace is based on God’s foreknowledge!

Jesus’ whole message was about the Kingdom of God. The world is struggling with coronavirus; there has recently been an American election; in Britain we’re going through Brexit – but we need to be reminded that the message of Jesus was focused on the coming Kingdom, the blessing of the Kingdom! Not the kingdoms of this world! Jesus said, “My Kingdom is NOT of this world!” It’s a heavenly Kingdom. And Paul is reminding us that God has already blessed us with spiritual blessings in heavenly places. As we experience the blessing and the love of Jesus through our relationship with Him in our hearts, that translates us into a spiritual, heavenly place – even while we’re still here!

Our confidence is in Christ! When we have faith in God, He takes away our fear. In Christ we have no fear of the past, the future, no fear of the virus, no fear of the devil – we have confidence in God! Scripture says, don’t throw away your confidence! Keep that confidence in the reconciliation we have with God – nothing can break our relationship with God, no evil can destroy what we have, we are one with God, reconciled in Christ – and that’s why Jesus Christ is so important in our lives! 

Join us in prayer on Friday 22 January for our nation; this is being supported by Christian groups almost universally across the whole nation. Simply called a ‘Day of Prayer for our Needy Nation’, I and many other Christian leaders and organisations, are calling as many as possible to join in prayer and fasting. Pray for OUR nation, simply in YOUR home – with friends – or family. Spend one hour, any hour, in fasting and prayer to Almighty God for OUR nation – call upon Him for deliverance.

God already knows the future; His plans and purposes cannot be thwarted by pandemic or economic collapse. Speaking through Isaiah, God says, ‘Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction… Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it.’ (Isaiah 30:20-21.) The path that we are walking now, God has said, ‘This is the way, walk in it!’ I want to encourage you, follow Him! God has prepared your future!

If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away, all things have become new! Don’t question it, don’t doubt it. If we have become a new creature, then we have lost all ties to the old. People come to me and I have to tell them, if you have come to Christ, the past is forgiven, it’s dead. That’s what God says. But some people have been told that, because of their past, and also because of their parents and ancestors and what they have done in their past, they are not free. No! This is a lie.  When you come to Christ the WHOLE of the past is dead, gone. Whether you were a drug addict, an alcoholic, or whether in your family tree there was witchcraft or freemasonry – all that is gone! You are literally a new creation by faith in Christ. You do not have a tattered, battered old life, but a NEW life in Christ. By faith in Him, we become sons and daughters of God. It's a miracle!

We have hope, because 2 Corinthians 5:18 says, ‘All things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.’ When God made us in the beginning, we were one with Him! And through Christ we have been accepted into the Beloved.