I'm learning to say and receive "God bless you" in a godly manner.
To recognise that the prayer is asking God to give you everything you need to improve your godliness and wholeness, and also remove everything in and around you that hinders your godliness and wholeness.
Beyond the obvious material riches and "good things", there are also many unpalatable blessings that furnish us with godliness and wholeness.
God may also remove riches and "good things" so we can be rich unto God and mature in His character.
May the God of all blessings bless us!
Eventually, every serious believer collides with the silence of God. You pray, and nothing shifts. Heaven stays completely still while problems mount in real time.
In that gap, a fear takes shape that few believers will say out loud.
Scripture tells you God possesses an unbroken, eternal joy. That He cannot suffer loss. That death is powerless before Him. That He already knows how the story ends.
And when you are bleeding, that certainty starts to look like detachment.
You begin to suspect you are the prank. That somewhere behind the veil, the one who holds all outcomes is watching your panic the way someone watches a joke they wrote long before you arrived.
Christianity has an answer to that suspicion. Stranger than noise. More demanding than a sign. It tells you what God is doing in the silence, where He reveals four distinct faces.
First is the attentive face of the craftsman.
Malachi 3:3 says “He sits as a refiner of silver”. In the ancient workshop, sitting was not passivity; it was the posture of supreme proximity. A silversmith does not shout over the flames or pace the room. He pulls his chair to the lip of the fire because the work demands unblinking focus.
God does not manage our suffering from a safe distance. He leans over the crucible, watching the flame and guarding the parameters of our pain so the heat purifies without destroying the vessel. His stillness is the proof of His closeness.
Second is the archival face of the judge.
When injustice runs unchecked and the innocent are exploited, silence is not consent. It is the terrifying patience of an open ledger.
Human anger is loud and erratic because we fear losing control, but divine justice operates with immaculate, unhurried precision.
Nothing is lost on God. The most calculated injustice, the quietest tear, and the subtlest abuse of power are cataloged with absolute exactness. An empire that fell two thousand years ago stands before His judgment seat with the exact same freshness as an injustice committed this morning.
Third is the priestly face of the intercessor.
This is the scandal of the Christian faith. God did not supervise human sorrow from the safety of eternity; He entered the fire Himself.
In Christ, we have a high priest who stepped into our vulnerability and took the silence of heaven into His own flesh. At Golgotha, the Word through whom all things were made took on our dereliction beneath a blackened sky. God did not just administer the silence. He endured it.
When we sit in the quiet, we are not trapped in a place God has never been.
Fourth is the sovereign face of divine intention.
When Joseph told his brothers that what they meant for evil God meant for good, he was not pretending the pit and prison never happened. God does not merely erase the historical reality of loss. He overrules its meaning and trajectory. He absorbs the malice of betrayal and weaves it into an indestructible architecture of deliverance.
That is the bedrock of Romans 8:28. God commandeers every deficit, deceit, and displacement, forcing the weapon designed to break us to serve our ultimate good.
To stand in the silence of God is never to stand in an empty room. Silence is terrifying only when you do not know who is in the dark with you. When you know His character, the quiet stops being a void. It becomes the purposeful stillness of a God who is watching the fire, keeping the ledger, bearing the grief, and finishing a redemption that no human malice can destroy.
FEAR GOD o!
There really is no context where it is biblically accurate to say "Jesus is not better than the believer."
Jesus as the head of the church, for instance, is not an exact parallel to husband as head of the wife. Both the husband and the wife are creatures. But both Jesus and the church are not creatures. Jesus exists by the necessity of His own being. The parallel therefore, though incredibly illuminating, has colossal limitations.
No matter how you situate our relationship with Jesus, one critical difference is that whatever (attribute) Jesus gives or even shares with us, He has such attribute necessarily, but we have it contingently. Read it again.
Secondly, Jesus may give me His righteousness, yet I cannot transmit it to others, but He continues to be the only one who can transmit it. So, you see, righteousness in me is not an exact mirror of righteousness in Jesus. Also, righteousness in Jesus is not merely a status. It is exhaustive. Jesus' righteousness means that He can not do (I don't mean He will not do, but I mean He can not do) anything wrong, because His righteousness is not just a legal status. It is not imputed. Righteousness is grounded in His beign. I hope you know what that means. The believer however CAN do things that are unrighteous, even though she is legally righteous. So, while righteousness exists in both cases, they are not identical in every sense. More, Jesus is the explanation of the believer's righteousness, and yet the same Jesus is the explanation of His own righteousness.
Thirdly, I need Jesus to sustain whatever I receive from Him. I continue to need Him to keep me in His righteousness, in His grace, in eternal life, etc. If Jesus were to leave me at any point (blessed assurance, He will not), I will lose everything He has imputed to me. He upholds all things. I don't. I stand because He is able to keep and continues to keep me. He has no keeper. No one sustains Him in eternal life, or in righteousness. His righteousness does not need any support to stay intact. Mine needs to be sustained. It is wrong therefore to say His righteousness is NOT better than mine. More, I think it is meaningless to say so.
Besides, according to scripture, the root and the branches are not the same simply because they both share in a common life (sap). As Paul said in his Roman correspondence, "remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you." If you are being upheld by another – one who is self-sufficient and needs no upholding – it is both inaccurate and irresponsible to say your Supporter is not better than you, particularly with reference to the very attribute by which he holds you up.
It is also sloppy to say because Jesus is our righteousness, and our sanctification, He is therefore not better than us. That same passage says He is our Wisdom. Is Jesus better than us in wisdom or not? If you say 'Jesus is not more righteous than me,' can you say 'Jesus is not more wise than me'?
I saw someone making a money analogy. It fails. If I have ten thousand Naira and I give it to you, it is no longer available to me to give to another person. And if you, the recipient, are generous, you can gift it to your friend. Jesus being our ransom is something infinitely richer and different than the money analogy suggests. The same Jesus is the ransom for us all. He does not diminish through donation. But whereas I can give you the ten thousand I was given, if I chose to, I can not transfer the righteousness I've received. Nevertheless, Jesus can. How then can I be as delusional as to say He is not better than me, even in righteousness!?
Okay, "As He is, so are we in this world." Yes, but it is: AS He is; not WHO He is.
Heb 7:7 (NKJV) says, "beyond all contradiction the lesser is blessed by the better." We are the blessed. We are lesser than our 'Blesser.' And He – Jesus – is better than us.
Again, 1Pet 2:17 says you should FEAR God.
UPPER ROOM LAGOS will be a Holy Ghost Service!!!
All I’m seeing and sensing is baptism of 🔥🔥🔥
Please don’t miss this one for anything.
Activation of spiritual gifts… infilling of the Spirit!!!
See you there! Tell someone to tell another
Your breakthrough is not determined by the size of your obstacle but by the greatness of your God. Stay faithful,He is working even when you cannot see.
"But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint." - Isaiah 40:31
Beyond the sound: where musical excellence meets scriptural integrity.
A new review drops next week! We cannot wait 🤩.
Think you know which song? Be the first to guess it in the comments! 🎶👇
#gospel#musicreview
Hey everyone 😌.
This year I’m starting something interesting about gospel music. I will be writing on these songs.
The aim is to appreciate the technical brilliance behind the song and reveal scriptural insights from the lyrics.
Here is the first ❤️.
THREAD.
My Bro/Sis, you see that thing you’ve been waiting on God for and almost thinking it would never happen, eh? very soon, much sooner than you think, It will happen. And you will come back to this particular tweet, to say “IT HAS HAPPENED.” IN JESUS’ NAME.
You are blessed !