Mark 1:1-3

1:1 The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.   2 It is written in Isaiah the prophet: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way”- 3 “a voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'”   NIV

The beginning of the gospel

The greatest challenge present day Christians are faced with is the comprehensive understanding of what the gospel truly is. Most of the definitions we have had in time past are limited to the tradition and denominational beliefs.  The Body of Christ cannot be divided in regards to the standard and dimensions of what the gospel mean and represent in the mind of the Father, and still expect to have the same comprehensive revelational understanding of their purpose to one. We all have the same Holy Bible, yet when we read it, our knowledge, understanding and interpretation of what is written differs from each other. Why? The template of our revelational understanding of the Son of God who is the melting-point of all spiritual truth has not been synchronized which each other, such that what we read are not  influenced by religious, humanistic prejudice mentality. one of the result of the fallen nature of man is that his soulish perception always seek to interfere with the divine plan of God to his own detriment .  A church like that of Corinthians looks and sound highly spiritual from from the outside but are completely divided in the corporate revelation of the person of Christ and his purpose for their live. Apostle Paul when further to say, he could not speak to them as spiritually mature people but as babies who still need spiritual milk.

1 Cor 3:1-4

3:1 Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly-mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? 4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere men? NIV

What could have gone wrong in the spiritual foundation of this church? They look so successful outwardly and spiritually gifted but they lacked the basis of what defines true spiritual relationship as in regards to their corporate purpose.  The division and schisms we see today in the Church of the Lord are as a result of imbalance gospel of the revelation of Christ.  The emphasis on none essentials in the body of Christ is draining the spiritual life that ought to enhance our revelational understanding of Christ and each other.  The concept of the church of Corinth was outwardly based. The emphasis to build spiritual character in order to sustain their giftings and anointings were relegated behind.

Their need and pressure to spiritually impress others were overwhelming. This is the same problem we have today in the mainstream churches. Mega churches are building mega saints without character and inner fortitude to sustain a balanced spiritual lifestyle.  Their understanding of what the gospel means is completely opposite to the definition and purpose of the Lord for the gospel message.   The revelation of the true gospel begins with the footing of the understanding Christ as the pattern for all human existence.  Meaning, the revelation of Christ being the way, the truth and the life that sustains your being must be clearly understood from the initial stage of your spiritual development so that you are not pushed around by every wind of doctrine.

Understanding the multifaceted dimension of the gospel

One of the errors church leaders and pastors have caused this generation of Christians, to the point of becoming offended the moment they hear the undiluted truth; is the issue narrowing down to the meaning of the gospel, to a mere English definition of the word good news.  A message can only be good news to the hearer if there is a serious consciousness of a person’s present state of being in need of help.  In other words, the awareness of your condition defines what you term to be good news. In other words, to what degree are people aware of the seriousness of the fallen nature and condition. Do they understand that virtually nothing can be done in their own strength that can bring glory to God? Are they aware of the severe consequence of rejecting the truth of the gospel of our Lord?  Are they also aware that becoming a Christian is more than joining a local assembly where people become enslaved to their needs and so-called spiritual leaders?

They need to be deliberately aware that becoming a follower of Christ defines total freedom and liberty from their past bondage, and sometimes might face issues that will challenge their faith and trust in the Lord.   We must never try to defend the gospel of our Lord in such a way that might misrepresent the truth to these searching for the way. The need to come to the realization of the true meaning of the gospel and the demand it will make on them, so that when they finally accept the Lord, they will not be struggling with wrong expectations.   The gospel, according to Christ is only for those who are truly thirsty for its water and hungry for its bread.   Imagine you are not in need of water and you suddenly receive a letter from the ministry of water and environment that they will be supplying you with five thousand gallons of water for the next two months free of charge.

That is a lot of water for you and it might sound good but won’t count that much as good news to you because you are not really in need of water.  However, suppose you and your family have been living in the backyard room of your childhood friend for the past five years because you don’t have a good job to afford a house. You woke up one morning and suddenly heard you are required to come to the ministry of housing with your documents for verification.

You never applied for a house and you cannot remember anyone to have applied on your behalf. While you are waiting at the door of the chief officer of the housing department, so many thoughts are running through your mind and then you are called in.  A polite man smiled at you and asks for your documents because he needs to verify some information; came back into the office and shook your hands and said, in the next seven day you will receive a call from the department to come collect the key of your three bedroom apartment with two garage, all paid for. He went on to explain how the houses were built by some foreign NGO firms, in collaboration with the house department of your country to help alleviate the issues of housing and population.  You stood there speechless wondering how, who gave your details to be a recipient. Now that qualifies to be good news from the human perception.   Now the good news, which is the gospel, can be likening to a man sentenced to death because he murdered an innocent child cold-bloodedly only for him to be given a state pardon just an hour before his execution.

Pressing into the meaning of the gospel of the kingdom

As powerful as this may be, it is still limited in revelational experience of what the gospel is and intended to accomplish in human life. The gospel does not just pardon us from the sentence of death we deserve, but we are also given the very nature of Christ so we do not return to our old carnal nature. The process of this change is what the gospel of the kingdom is all about. The fallen human nature needs to first see the state of its fallen rebellious nature, in order to fully appreciate the need of the good news, called the gospel. The way the gospel is presented today by our so-called ‘Hollywood make me feel good’ preachers, do not give the people any opportunity to understand and appreciate their need for the gospel as a solution to their unregenerated soul. Firstly, let me inform your mind, the gospel is not just about a message that merely comes to pardon your sin, bless you and ultimately give a free one-way ticket to heaven. . Far beyond these benefits; the message of the gospel of the kingdom is about the revelational life and nature of Christ taking full residence and dominion over your mind and its faculties.

This gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ has various components, compartments and operational dimensions that must be clearly recovered in this hour of transition, and carefully understood in regards to the rebuilding, transformation and restoration of the total man and creation back to the Father’s intent. This message, I must admit, has not been fully recognized and taught in a manner that attracts the return of Christ back to the earth in the fullness of his majesty and glory. In Act chapter 3:20-21, we are informed that Christ shall remain in heaven until the time God appoints for the restoration of all things.  There is no doubt that we are in the season the Lord has appointed for the restoration.  This present generation is climaxing the prophetic promise of the return of the Lord first to his church and then to the nations. Upon us, the church, has fallen the sole responsibility of preparing the way of the Lord and making his path straight for his glorious return. The hearts of men are the ancient highway designed for the return of the messiah. Before the Lord makes his glorious appearance in the sky for all eyes to see, he must first make his grand entrance first through the doorway of human minds that have allowed the purifying ministry of circumcision to take place.

For those who have opened their hearts to the process of divine preparation do not need to wait for a day to be raptured away, since they are already living in the reality of their ultimate spiritual inheritance,  which is the reward of immortality.  The power of spiritual death is daily being conquered in the life of these saints who have totally given their soul to the Lord. Enrapturement of the spirit of the saints is a present reality. You do not need to wait for a day to die before making it to heaven. Death is a doorway to the other side of life. Those who choose to willingly lay down their life on the altar of daily sacrifice have received his eternal life, a life that cannot be stopped or hindered by earthly carnal interference.   The ones who understood the ministry of life have conquered death and the grave. Meaning, they are being cut-up {raptured} in their daily glorious worship and devotion to the one they love.    The one’s who have allowed him and his kingdom into their soul will certainly have the joy of their sight being re-calibrated to see his mortal appearance at the blast of the seventh last trumpet.

The interference of the soul in understanding the gospel

As long as the human soul continue to take dominance over the life and authority of the spiritman, little or nothing will be done within the inner development of man back to his original place of functionality. The human soul is designed to cooperate through the help of the Holy Spirit with his regenerated spirit in order to establish the counsel of God. The soul, which is the seat of desire, feeling and intellect, requires more than just the hearing of the gospel message to positively change; the soul must be€ compelled through a deliberate submission to the authority of the ministry of the truth.  Fallen humans are afraid of the truth because the truth exposes our hidden nature in a way we might not be too comfortable for others to see.  Shame and fear are two very powerful weapons the enemy uses to hide and hinder many from allowing God to heal and restore them. Death-separation from God’s presence produces shame and fear.

Only the restoration of the gospel of life, which produces light within the dark regions of the soul, can bring lasting freedom.  One can sit under a powerful word ministry and never allow the authority of the word to reach those deep unresolved issues of the heart.  Going back to the first statement I made about the gospel having various components and compartments becomes clearer, we look at the role the unregenerated soul has played so far in altering the destiny of individuals, families and nation.  Deep within us are various kingdoms and empires that has been sustained through the illegitimate authority of the soul that need to be pulled down for the truth of God’s kingdom to have a place for the construction of the house of God in us. Hiding behind a gospel that cannot save you from yourself is self-delusion.

The message we call the gospel today in the church is far from what the Bible describe and prescribed to be the gospel.  What is the heart of the gospel? How can we restore the message of the good news of the kingdom of heaven in such a way that will attract and men and women to the foot of the cross for their regeneration? While the Lord is still working in my own heart, I cannot help to feel the anguish and pain in the heart of the Father concerning the present despondent state of the Church.  While we struggle in fashioning tools and bricks to build towers to reach God, God is busy pulling down the towers and confusing our communication network but still we do not seem to get the message.  The church of Christ today owns most of the largest worship sanctuaries across the world, we can boast of the largest human gathering outside the field of sport, yet we are so far from the truth to the point we are almost losing our integrity and relevancy before political leaders.

The gospel designed for every aspect of your personality

The gospel of the kingdom is designed to reach every aspect of human existence and bring them under the total governing authority of the kingdom of heaven. No matter how exposed you may be to the gospel, if you have not opened your heart {mind} to  the scrutiny of the Holy Spirit in order to show you who you truly are in the light of the message of the kingdom, you will continue to live in assumption in regards to your nature. Each of us has degrees of darkness that needs to be deliberately dealt with in the light of the present ministry of reformation. I understand that you have read the bible, you can quote the scripture and preach all the so-called apostolic messages but to what level have you allow those words to preach within your own heart to the point of exposing you to your true self.

Remember the word is likening to a mirror. A mirror shows you who you truly are; even if you don’t seem to like what people tell you about yourself, you cannot deny what your inner self discloses about yourself.  When you look into the mirror, you do not see someone else, do you?     One of the characteristics of the revelational knowledge of Christ is the ability to call you by your true name-nature. You cannot hide from the true gospel, when you encounter truth no matter how hard and difficult you seem to be; the truth will certainly break you and expose you to yourself.  This was the case of Saul on his road to Damascus. No mortal has been able to resist the powerful force of the divine light that shines from the face of Christ. Moses at the backside of the wilderness encounter the same message, what about Jacob on his journey to Panda-Aram. Gen 28.

The gospel of the kingdom brings true and lasting experience that surpasses any temporary material satisfaction. When you encounter the gospel of the kingdom within your heart, you do not need to impress others to accept it. If what they see through your life is not powerful enough to draw them to Christ, then wait until the illuminating light of that gospel become fully radiant through your reformed character. The gospel of the kingdom of God is beyond a message preached on Sunday morning; it is an experience of divine encounter that brings the transforming glory and power of God to bear through your lifestyle in the marketplace. What did Christ do in his days on earth to impress thousands of people following him? The fact is, at a point his message became so hard on some of his own disciples to the point they had to stop following him. They can’t just bear his demand for self-denial, they felt it was enough to follow him but to sacrifices everything they have and represent was just too much for them to bear. You cannot follow Christ to the place of eternal life until you are willing to lose everything you think you have gained through your own strength. Your self-made tower must first come down and then, he can build his own house in you and through you.

If you must gain life, which is the core message of the kingdom you must embrace death, which is the foundation of the gospel of the kingdom. In him was life and the life has become the light of men. Translating life to the illuminating {knowledge} light in solving complex human challenges is one of the core purposes of the message of the kingdom. The beauty of the last days is the increase of the revelation of kingdom light we are going to witness as the world is baptised in the spirit of {confusion and frustration} darkness.  Darkness is the covering of the hearts of those who have refused to follow Christ who is the light of the world.  Almost everyone today says, “We are in the last days” but do we actually understand the prophetic implication of such a statement. The last days or the end of days as some theologians prefer to call it, defines a season in the spirit where two prophetic realities are being consummated simultaneously. One is seeking to bring final destruction and judgement to all creation while the other through the power of the Spirit is creating a way of escape and deliverance to humanity by the accurate preaching and teaching of the gospel of the kingdom of God. .

The Spirit of truth in each believer must awake to the ongoing work of his own inner regeneration and development in a way that keeps him uncertified until the inner working of the cross is fully accomplish within. Discovering the Father’s purpose for your life, family and generation, positions your spiritman into a new dimension of spiritual awareness in the act of knowing and engaging yourself in the light of the proceeding word of God. This conscious embracing of the ministry of truth, builds within you the capacity to abandon yourself to the pruning and process of your deliverance so that the message of apostolic reconciliation will find a pure place of expression through your life.  For this to become a reality, this message of the kingdom and its delivery must be void of the best of human ideology and what Christianity been defined to be from the religious point of view. Using the wisdom of this world to try to convey the message of the kingdom firstly is spiritual pollution, secondly it will only produce Ishmael instead of Isaac, the promised Son. Within the message is embedded the life that only answers to the operating system of heaven.  Due to the ignorance of this operating system by some of the church leaders, the worthiness and value that should accord this kingdom message in the context of Church’s reformation and the relevance of human development has been misplaced.

The heartbeat of the apostolic gospel

2 Corinthians 11:1-4

11:1 I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness; but you are already doing that. 2 I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. 3 But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. 4 For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. NIV

The scripture in 2 Corinthians 11 verse 2, shows how far Apostle Paul was willing to go in accurately presenting and representing at the same time the heartbeat of the apostolic message, and the attitude of apostolic leadership in regards to delivering the message to the saints.   In your time of transiting from Pentecostal {wineskin} mentality to the Present emphasis of the Spirit, one of the core issues that is vigorously dealt with is your perception. Your perception certainly affects your attitude, behaviour and passion towards your past concept of understanding and existence.  When the Lord commanded, Abraham to leave the land of his nativity to the Land the Lord will later show him, he obeyed and never looked back to the land of his birth. Even when things became very difficult and unbearable for him, he still held unto the promise of the Lord. The scripture tells us that when he wanted a wife for his son Isaac, he warned his servant never to go to his home country to get a wife for his son.  Why?  The Lord has already separated him from his past and that past to him never existed again.

The advancement of the kingdom of God within our heart must become clear that we understand the repercussion of returning to the former place the Lord brought us out from.   The ministry of Apostle Paul like the servant of Abraham is to search out, prepare and expose the bride {the Church} to her husband-Christ in the spirit of truth. The duty of apostolic leadership is not to struggle for the place of Christ in the hearts of those whom they have been called to prepare for our Lord. Your duty is to expose to the true revelational nature and character of the husbandman in the heart of his bride in such a manner that ultimately brings joy and honour to the bridegroom. Permit me to ask you this question, who have you been exposed to as your husband? Is Christ the anointed one or some other spirit camouflaging to be the true Christ? You as a believer must know this if you desire to please the Father according to his will for your life.

Matt 7:21-25

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’  24 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. NIV Brethren, this standard of the Kingdom gospel and its process has not changed.

In the same scripture, Paul used the word jealous to describe in a positive manner his anguish for the saints when he heard of how they have quickly turned back from the gospel of truth they were exposed to.  The promotion of another gospel that sounds and looks like the true gospel has been in existence right from the days of the first Adam in the garden. The plan of the enemy has not changed since then to see that men and women do not understand the true nature and life of what the gospel is from the Lord’s perspective. The intension of the enemy is to corrupt the seed of the revelation of Christ within the spiritual understanding of the saint so that their virginity-pureness of heart becomes corrupt, thereby rejected by the Lord as his bride.

He went on to say that he was afraid that they would also become deceived just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s craftiness.  Deception is Satan’s best strategy and most powerful weapon in fighting and neutralizing the advancement of the Christian walk. Every battle he has ever fought and won was through the platform of deception. Unfortunately, many are still not aware of the strategy of the enemy. He uses it to fight relationships in both our homes and churches. He uses it in the community and across the nations to promote wars amongst countries.  He tried using the same weapon on our Lord Christ in Mathew chapter 4, just after he had finished the forty days fast. The reason why he was unable to deceive Christ was not that he did not know the scripture. He failed because Christ clearly understood the law of scriptural application.  When we lack the knowledge of the written word and the Sprit of truth, we become easy prey to the lies of the enemy.  Deceptions work because there is a quest and desire in each of us to want to know things without the proper foundation that guides the principles of knowledge.

Waiting for the appropriate timing of the Spirit to guide us in all truth cannot be overemphasised. The enemy capitalizes on the subtle and lustful nature of the soul to amass knowledge it has no capacity to process. The insecurity that makes Christians lust after knowledge and achievement without necessarily trusting in the Lord will be exposed and dealt with at the foot of the cross. The Lord will not allow any religious ‘fig leaves’ to remain in our lives as he brings us to the place of complete surrender. We cannot hide on the pretence of being a Christian without our lives truly living for him in words and deeds.

Our devotion should not be limited to the seeking for spiritual knowledge because it gives us a sense of false security.  The quest for revelational knowledge has become more like a magic charm that most Christian’s today beliefs will suddenly make their problems go away.  Our passion for revelation should be to develop a strong inner relationship with the Lord in a way that establishes a personal encounter with the Lord as he also seeks to know us. Another gospel could be defined to be anything that does not bring us closer to the true revelational reality of Christ’s nature and life, such that his glorious illuminating light becomes radiant through our daily interface and interaction with the world around us.

Without properly addressing this misconception, developing the believer’s faith towards perfection will continue to be a difficult mission.  This present season demands all seekers of the true God to reappraise their foundational template so they can be ready to receive the new outpour of the wine of the Spirit.  It is highly important to know that the gospel is not western, African or Asian. Neither is the gospel of the kingdom an extension of Judaism like some are advocating today.   The strength of a structure is embedded within its foundation-the place where thoughts are processed and accepted to be true or wrong.  The scripture declares in Ps 11:3 If the foundations are destroyed, What can the righteous do? NKJV