From the desk of Steve Shultz:
Way back in the 1980's, I would say that God began "blowing my mind" or one could say "showing me the truth" of HIS Word. Even though it was in the Bible the whole time, and I was a Church-School teacher, I never saw it. God had made promises in the past, but later HE came up with BETTER PROMISES. Did you know God could out-do Himself with better promises than early promises? It's in the Word:
Hebrews 8:6, But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which He is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.
Kathie Walters is one of the least religious people I know. We've made some of her awesome teachings available just below. I PRAY that you order them; your life will never be the same.
And like Kathie's word below says, "You're NOT under Contract with God!"
Read it and WEEP WITH JOY.
Kathie Walters:
Break Off Judgment—You're NOT Under Contract
Break Off Judgment
God gave me two things for you (and me) to set us free to enjoy more of the liberty that Jesus freely provided. His liberty has set us free. First, break off from your life every false judgment that has come against you. Those judgments do affect you and can affect areas of your life, even physically.
When people make false judgments about you, it is witchcraft because they are putting themselves in the place of God. People make judgments out of pride, and God resists pride. If you have made judgments according to what you saw with your eyes or heard with your ears, then you need to repent and release the people, church, or ministry that you judged. Believe me, if you do this, you will find that clouds lift off of your life. Things that are holding you back will be broken. You aren't God, you don't know the whole situation and you don't know the heart of someone. You must see what God sees. The same judgments you make will return to you again, according to Jesus.
Not Under Contract
One of the biggest plots the enemy does, to prevent you from receiving all that God has promised, is to make you feel you aren't keeping your end of the "contract." We often think of the New Covenant as a kind of contract, but it's not a contract—it's a promise which you embrace and receive.
I want you to take a few minutes and read this passage from Romans 4 in The Message Bible. Read it a few times and think about it—I promise it will set you free and you will be able to start receiving the things that are lacking in your life.
Trusting God
Romans 4
So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."
If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust Him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-Him-to-do-it (for you) is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:
"Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate. Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score."
Embrace What God Did for You
Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our (Jewish) religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways (and keeping the law), who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don't we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit (and right) before God?
Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That's right, before he was marked. That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with Himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.
And it means further that Abraham is father of all people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the "outs" with God, as yet unidentified as God's (people), in an "uncircumcised" condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called "set right by God and with God"! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God's action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.
It's a Promise—Not a Business Deal
That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered (and embraced) when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God's promise at that—you can't break it (because you didn't make it).
This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and His way, and then simply embracing Him and what He does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it. Those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that's reading the story backward. He is our faith father.
We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" (of faith) and then became a (natural) father (as well) because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word and make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said He (could and) would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God Himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"
Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged (head first) into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." But it's not just Abraham; it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God. (Emphasis and notes mine.)
Yippee! This is awesome, isn't it? Read it several times. We are not under contract with God; we are GIVEN a promise to embrace.
Kathie Walters
Kathie Walters Ministry
Email: kathiewalters@mindspring.com
