Notes from Sunday 3 November 2013..
Speaker: Pastor Yabari Uebari
Key Passages: Isaiah 60:1-3
When God brings us a word a word of knowledge, He is reveals what he has already gone to do ahead of us. The word Arise is a command that means ‘I have looked at you and I know you are in a place you should not be’. The word for us to day is ARISE!
There are several parts to Isaiah 60: 1-3;
“Arise, shine;
For your light has come!
And the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.
For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth,
And deep darkness the people;
But the Lord will arise over you,
And His glory will be seen upon you.
The Gentiles shall come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising”
We will start where God starts. The command is to Arise! God will not ask us to do anything that he has not made provision for. God is asking us to ARISE because he has provided all we need to ARISE. Success and moving ahead is dependent on you – the individual.
Arise for the Glory has risen upon you!
The Glory is the physical expression of God’s fullness upon us. It means God has placed himself completely at your disposal. Indeed, by virtue of the covenant of creation, God has bound himself upon you.
Arise & shine is call to action; a call to holiness, a call to change how we interact. It is a call to move from where we are to where we should be. God is saying you should not remain where you are now. It is about growth, development, progress and so on. Wherever we are now, God is telling us to arise. We must not remain constrained to our life conditions and situations if we are to arise. Don’t allow your past and all you have gone through stop you from arising.
2 Peter 1:3 says: ‘as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue’.
Why should you arise? Because it is the risen that can worship God. People who are depressed can’t find time to worship. Why should a child of a King be depressed? It is a wrong representation for a child of God, child of a King to be depressed and dejected. Arise! You don’t have to accept where you are! ARISE is a call to reject the negative circumstances of our lives. The amplified version of the Isaiah 60:1-3 says to us “don’t settle for less”;
“Arise, shine;
For your light has come!
And the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.
For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth,
And deep darkness the people;
But the Lord will arise over you,
And His glory will be seen upon you.
The Gentiles shall come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising”
The other implication of God telling us to ARISE is that God knows that you capable of making ‘it’. You need to believe in yourself as much as God does.
There are seasons in our lives, and there are periods when God does remarkable things in our life. God sometimes gives us landmark victories and milestones. If God is asking you to arise, it is because He is about to bring landmark victories and milestones into your lives.
You need to follow what God is saying, you need to arise or you will be left behind.
If you are lazy, you will miss out when the cloud of Glory is moving. If God is saying arise, he wants to transform you, and give a landmark victory. I pray that God will so bless you that a scar of that blessing is left in your life. God has gone ahead of us to prepare the way so we just need to follow up.
How do we arise: a lesson from the prodigal son in Luke 15:17-20;
“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, 19 and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”’
“And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him”.
The motivation to arise is based on God. When you arise all of Heaven’s resources are mobilized put together to make you succeed.
You have to contact God to arise. Once you arise, God is ready to meet you half way to make it happen. To arise, you must have a resolve, you must desire it. There has to be intense desire coming from you; Show it in your prayer, in your giving, in all you do. When you arise you will begin to get into the unraveling Glory of God.
2 Corinthians 3:18 says;
“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord”.
You have to arise and take hold of all required, so as to enter into the Glory. It is in the process of arising that the glory of God comes upon. It is when you are rise that people will see the glory of God; it is in your passion that God will see your resolve to arise. If you are in your pit, you cannot see the glory!
In closing we need to arise because it is in that RISING that God will bless you and thereby be glorified.
