2021 New Year’s Message

This is your year to let the glory of the Lord in you bless others in significant ways. Would You!

Submission is the only currency you need to trade in love with anybody anywhere at anytime - family, friends, foes, colleagues, and civil authority. Through this spiritual currency, you have the purchasing power to ‘buy’ any form and kind of ‘meanness’ from people by trading them at the cross where every pain of injustice was paid for. And every time you come to the Cross, this same spiritual currency, your submission, receives a new lease on life to be invested back into lives through your loving responses.

Submission is divine power given to every believer to love people the way God loves people and to see people the way God sees people. It was the power of submission working in Christ that made possible our redemption on the cross when he said, “Father, not my will but your will be done.” Without the divine power of submission working in Christ, there will be no Cross. And if there was no Cross, there would be no resurrection. Submission is sacrifice and suffering rooted in an already won victory. This divine power of submission gives us boldness to do what is right in God’s eyes when humiliated, mocked, and abused.

God’s divine power of submission starts to work in a persons’ life the moment he or she begins to follow Jesus. Where this divine power of submission is at work, there is always a cross to carry and a resurrection to follow. Jesus confirms this: “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24), and He continues in Luke saying, “And whoever does not carry his cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple.”

Jesus set the pattern by his submission to suffer and die on the Cross. 1Peter 2:21 says that, TO THIS we have been called. Jesus’ submission to suffer and die for us revealed God’s plan to save people. The power of submission when in operation, opens one’s heart and mind to know God’s will and to follow it joyfully. It is a sure way to align ourselves with the divine purposes of God. Daniel’s submission to King Nebuchadnezzar to find interpretation to his dreams opened doors for Daniel to exercise a gift of interpreting dreams and receiving visions from God. His submission unearthed a gift of interpretation of dreams and visions which otherwise would have been idle. Daniel’s gifts of dreams and visions grew as he submitted under difficult situations, and yet it was through these giftings we have received information about events that will take place in the world in these Last days.

God uses the power of submission working effectively in Christ’s followers to soften the hard hearts of sinners with His extravagant love. God’s glory has been poured into jars of clay, (that is followers of Christ) and the power of this Glory, which is submission to God, does only ‘ONE WORK’ with the clay: it breaks and remoulds it for various purposes daily until Christ returns and the clay is completely replaced with a glorified resurrected body (2Corinthians 4:6-7). The Glory of the Lord in the clay jar, in you and me, is like fragrance in a container. Unless the clay jar is broken regularly no one can smell the fragrance of God’s love, mercy, power, and fame. Submission is the breaking of the clay jar. Every time we submit to God’s Word the fragrance of God’s goodness touches lives and blesses them even though we might not see the evidence right away.

Answers to prayers are stalled when the power of submission is not employed by the follower of Christ. The Egyptian midwives’ submission to God and not to Pharaoh’s edict to kill the Hebrew babies opened the door for God to answer their prayers (Exodus 1:15-21). Allow God this New Year to answer prayers that may have been stalled by using submission as your only currency as you trade in love with others.

Do you want God’s glory in you to affect the lives of others positively and point them to their need of a Savior this New Year? Then use the spiritual currency of submission to trade in love every day in this New Year.

This New Year gives other believers opportunities to see that you are maturing towards perfection, one of the greatest evidence of submission, that is God’s glory in you!

"FATHER, YOUR WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.” Matthew 6:10

Happy New Year!