As more than a million people are trying to cope with being homeless, separated from loved ones, and in many, many cases, the loss of loved ones, the nation must begin to cope with issues that can either tear us apart or enable us to emerge more unified, stronger, and better than ever. To do this we must understand what happened and what did not happen. Every Christian needs to also understand why this happened.

        This week I received one of the most important letters I think I’ve ever received from a member of my own church. It convicted me of a terrible assumption and presumption on my part. I’m sharing it with you because many others may feel the same. This is the letter. I will make some brief comments at the end:

Because the Lord has already spoken to us about the events that are now coming to pass, we have been researching prophetic words previously published by us. I have been amazed, and encouraged by how clearly the Lord has spoken about them, and given us directions on how to be prepared for what is to come. We will be republishing many of these words in future bulletins, and even republishing some of our prophetic books such as The Harvest, and Epic Battles of the Last Days, adding to them the now abundant additional understanding that we have.

          Last week we began to consider the first sentence of “The Great Commission”: “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (see Matthew 28:18). This is probably much more than we can even comprehend in this life. Even so, it is the foundation upon which the rest of the mandate is based, so we should seek to not only understand it, but to let it be a guiding principle of our lives.

In Matthew 6:24, the Lord explained, "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." As Christians, we should be absolutely committed to using our lives to serve God, not money. However, if we do not use some basic financial principles, we are likely to spend our lives serving money and being too entangled in it to serve God. Our goal should be to make money our servant, instead of spending our lives serving it.

     We continue to cover the period represented by the prophetic church at Thyatira (538 to 1798 AD)—the darkest period in church history. It is crucial to understand this period because the roots of the “great falling away” are common to individuals backsliding or churches and movements departing from the way.

When the Lord fed the thousands with just a few fish and loaves, what made this miracle so great was that so much was done with so little. The Lord gets more glory when we have less in our hands to do His works with. One of the greatest hindrances to our seeing the miracles of God is when we have too much.

The first strategy of the devil to seduce mankind was to get our first parents to doubt the Word of God—“Did God really say that?” Once he got them to doubt what He had said, it was just a short step to getting them to doubt God’s intentions for them. From there, his ploy was to get them to feel rejected by God because He was holding something back from them. Christians who have been caused to stumble often go through this same pattern.