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Before David faced a crisis in the form of Goliath he went back into history and reminded Saul that he was not his first predicament. He had crises before in the forest and God gave him victory over lions and bears. David was able to celebrate his previous victories before He could face current crises.
You should not just focus on new battles, rather start by celebrating your victories over previous skirmishes. You should learn to enjoy and talk about your previous victories. You have to write it somewhere that God did something profound through you and you know it was just by His grace that you managed to succeed.
Many people are always worried about what is in front of them. They do not look back and see how God has given them victory because they always focus on what is ahead of them. How you manage your past is very important because it also determines how you are going to manage your future.
It is not just your future that is important; your past is equally significant. If you cannot rejoice in your past, obviously you cannot celebrate your future. There will be no need for God to help you master the future because He knows that as soon as you have mastered it, it becomes history and you have shown that you cannot celebrate past victories.
Look at what God has done for you so far and celebrate it.
“Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehemjudah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons. And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi, and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehemjudah.
“And they came into the country of Moab, and continued there.” (Ruth 1:1-2). Because of famine, Elimelech and his family decided to move out of Bethlehemjudah which means “House of Bread”.
There was a crisis in the land and as a way of managing it, they moved to Moab, which was a land that God had cursed. They did not care about the curse of the land, all they were concerned about was bread that was present in a cursed territory. They ran away from one crisis into another different crisis.
As a family, they first acknowledged and accepted that there was a crisis in Bethlehemjudah. They also identified that the crisis was in Bethlehemjudah and not in Moab. Crisis is designed in such a way that it cannot be everywhere at the same time.
Every problem is geographical; that is why we never had tsunamis in this country and yet it is a crisis in other countries. The problems you are currently facing in your marriage do not happen next door.
They are even surprised when they hear you beating up each other in the middle of the night. Crises are geographical, but sometimes when you find yourself immersed in a crisis, you will think everyone else is experiencing the same. Your neighbour might not have gone through what you are going through.
Elimelech and his family realised that Moab did not have the crisis they had in Bethlehemjudah, they then responded to that crisis through migration.
Moving out of the crisis was their best way of responding to it lest the crisis destroys them. Walking out of Bethlehemjudah was literally walking out of a crisis. It is possible that you can actually walk out of your problem and leave it untouched; that is another way of managing a crisis. You can decide to wait until you have your crisis destroyed or you can leave it as it is and go to a different location. While they were in Moab, Elimelech died right in the presence of provision.
That tells you that there was a different crisis in Moab which was not bread; it was a life crisis. He died right in the presence of bread to confirm what Jesus said that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes out of the mouth of the Lord. The two sons, Mahlon and Chilion married from Moab but they also died without any children. They were not productive in a place they thought was safe. They ran away from one problem entering into another different one.
While in a foreign land, Naomi later heard that God had visited His people in Bethlehemjudah by giving them bread. Unfortunately she was not part of God’s people He had visited for she had moved away.
This story requires that you understand the power of God. How can the visitation of God manifest as bread? It is amazing how having bread, corn, production and industries running in a nation can be called the Lord’s visitation.
Naomi heard that God had visited His people, not by raising the dead but by giving them bread. When we have prosperity in a nation we have the Lord’s visitation. When we cry for prosperity we are crying for a revival.
When God visits a nation, the manifestation of His presence is food on the table in the lives of His people. Having every kind of food you desire available in your house is not a sign of greed but of God’s visitation.
Criticising people advocating for prosperity is just targeting people who know what they are talking about. If you investigate how the hand of God manifests when it comes upon a nation, prosperity in a nation is proof of the presence of God.
During the famine that took place in Bethlehemjudah, there was no single death recorded there yet Elimelech and his family left thinking that the famine will destroy them.
Before you attempt to walk away from crisis, make sure that crisis is not an internal problem. That is one type of crisis you can never walk away from. When crisis is internal, you can divorce several times and still face the same crisis because it is not outside but inside you. You have to find where your crisis is. After you have identified your crisis you have to give it a name. Acknowledge you have it, identify where it is and give your crisis a name.
You should not just call it a crisis, be able to identify it with a name before you can deal with it. Identifying a crisis is very important because each crisis carries a different nature and different characteristics.
Crises have different appearances, they act in different ways and affect us in different ways. What keeps you afloat in any crisis is knowing that you have a crisis, but you are not the crisis. If you have a problem, just make sure that you are not the problem. Reproduced above are excerpts of a sermon preached by Emmanuel Makandiwa on Sunday, October 22, 2017.
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