Tree of Life Blog

The Bible is so clear and powerful and explicit on what should go first in our life. Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness and all these things shall be added to you (Matthew 6.33).

The first thing in your life should be God and His kingdom. If you want to have a life of increase and a life of fruitfulness, you have to learn to put God first. You put God before your comfort, you put God before your income, you put God before your security, you put God before your thoughts, your dreams, your ideals, your life. This will change your life for the better over and over and over again.

I am a pastor, I have been pastoring Tree of Life Church in Dagenham now for eleven years. It is a growing church, not just growing in size but also growing in wisdom and depth. People are becoming disciples and seeing the kingdom of God expressly grow and increase. If you think that you can do that in a week or two, or a month or two, or a year or two, you are a fool. We have to put the kingdom first in terms of time. I know someone whose vision is to go and plant a Bible College in a foreign nation, then after two years, move to another foreign nation and start another Bible College. That cannot be done. It is impossible. It takes more time than that. You have to keep putting God first. Find any growing successful church and you will find a church where the pastor has been in ministry a long time. You will find a pastor who put God’s kingdom first.

You need to put God’s plan and God’s kingdom first in your life. Then it takes time to prepare and get ready. You could not be a priest until the age of thirty in the Bible – Jesus did not start in ministry until the age of thirty. It takes years of putting God first again and again to get to where God wants you to go. It takes years to build a church, years to build character, years to build a ministry. So you need to put it first.

I know too many people who will only consider ministry when they are ready in their time, not God’s time. I know far too many people who will go to Bible College when they get their pension. They are exhausted from life, they have left themselves too little time to build something huge. They can still contribute and do something wonderful, and God is a God of restoration, but they have never put the kingdom of God first.

The kingdom of God really needs more young people! There are a whole bunch of things young people can do that older people cannot. They have a passion and life about them. Students can pray all night, serve in ways unencumbered by life and work and family. Give your first years to the Lord if you still can! If you are at an age and God is calling you to Bible College, don’t wait until the circumstances line up – do what God says.

The kingdom of God needs people of faith! If you crystalize for too long ignoring the call of God, your faith in your soul dries up, but if you act on what God is saying, you build momentum. There are people called to plant a church in 2010 the same year I was. Now in 2021, I have years of experience, wisdom, and momentum and I can see hundreds of churches. The person who ignored the call would take several years just to get back in place. We owe it to the kingdom of God to put it first in our lives. Ministry is, despite what most people assume, hard work. You do not have much time for yourself or your loved ones when you are a pastor! You need to start when you have a spring in your step still!

Do not hate the kingdom of God – put it first in your life. Do not put off kingdom work until you retire. What – architecture is a great choice for your life and when you are full of life, but now I am old and tired, I will serve God? No – put the kingdom first, whatever that means between you and God!

If the kingdom is first, then it is the kingdom you do first. Delay your marriage and serve the kingdom. Delay your career and serve the kingdom. Stop delaying the kingdom for everything else. The fields are right now white unto harvest, not in four months time. Do not bring delay into God’s Kingdom. Get up on Sunday and arrive at church early, someone will find you something to do to help set up.

People fail to realize that whenever God speaks, a timer starts. If you miss the opportunity, you will not be able to do what God has called you to do. The available time you have to serve the kingdom diminishes day by day! Well, I will bide my time with this and serve God later will not work as a life philosophy. If you are called to ministry, there is a clock counting down the days. Prepare, invest, get ready… do what it takes. Maybe you have been told to launch out into business to finance the kingdom – the time to do it is reducing. Maybe you have been told to move to another nation to serve Jesus – the time to do it is reducing. Prepare, get ready, learn, launch.

Put the kingdom of God first in terms of priority, and you will end up living the best life you can ever life. Selah!

I am starting a new series of blog posts today about how not to fall off the bridge. We are walking along a narrow path according to Jesus, and there are many people who have fallen off the bridge of faith and shipwrecked their faith. One of the reasons that people fall off the bridge is simple – they do not have good priorities. They do not put the most important things first, they do not choose well.

When you are a sinner or a brand new Christian, you only can choose to do a bad thing or a good thing, but when you start to grow as a Christian you need to learn to choose between two or three good things, and work out which one is the best thing. Jesus taught clearly in several places that we should put the first things first, that some things are more important than others. Some things are more important, should be done best and done first. As a Christian to stay on the bridge of faith, we need to work this out, work out what hte most important things are and do them.

God is so patient. He is so kind. Many people are not living for God but are still clearly very blessed, because God is so patient and kind. But here is the truth, if you are not living for God and not feeding on the Word of God and not feeding on His love and grace, and not praying in tongues, and keeping close to God, then eventually you are going to see the Word of God as insignificant in your life. Then you will not do what God wants to do in your life. The Word, living by faith, prayer, obedience to your calling – these are things you must do first.

I had a lot of distractions in my life – I got into medical school, I can sell things really well, I had a good career taking off in the city. But I am so glad today that I put God’s calling for my life first. I am so glad today that I did what God wanted me to do, and now I flow in the anointing and see miracles and see changed lives. Listen carefully – if I had not put my calling from God first, I could have ended up a doctor, I would be a in conference of doctors going “do you know one day I thought I might not go to medical school, I thought of being a pastor” and we would have all laughed at how young, immature, over-spiritual and over-zealous I was. I have met a number of people who have told me – I felt God called me to be a pastor, but they never did it, they went into business instead. They treat God as insignificant in their lives. They reach a certain age, and try and compensate for a life of ignoring God, they retire and go to Bible College to make up for 40 years of disobedience and ignoring God’s call on their life, and it never works well. God is still kind and patient and will open up doors to them, but their hearts take a long time to heal because of decades of ignoring God and His Word and His Spirit. I am talking about real things here. What would have saved these people? Doing first things first.

Another problem is that when we take important things and do not do them first, we often end up putting them off forever. That is one way to fall off the bridge of faith and stop being able to live by faith. If you fly often like I do, you will know that a delay can easily become a cancellation! If you delay in doing God’s Word and doing what God has called you to do, it often ends up as you never doing it. Many people intend on obeying God when their marriage is a bit more mature, after they have saved and gone on their first holiday abroad, when their children are older, when this or that. They put the kingdom of God in second place to all these things, and their victory and life never manifests and the right time never comes.

I have watched with a great heaviness in my heart people who are clearly called to ministry putting other things in the way, and delaying ministry until nothing happens at all. I have heard pastors tell me “God has told me to start another church” and they just do not do it. I have heard Bible College directors tell me “God has told me to start another Bible College” and they just do not do it. Always waiting for a better day is not the way forward, it’s the way to cancellation! People do not realize that every day that passes, circumstances change, and if you keep resisting God’s will, you will eventually reach a place where it simply does not matter any more and their dreams just do not motivated them anymore. It’s sad.

Has God spoken to you? Has He told you to do something? What has He asked you to do? Is obeying God first for you? Is His kingdom and His authority the most important thing in your life? Or have a million different things got in the way?

It is not faith and not grace to put God second or third or hundredth in your life. Can you imagine a man with two wives? He will never be able to give the right amount of attention to either of them! They will always be second in his life. You get married to be the number one in the other person’s life. And God is the same – He wants to be number one in your life. Not second to your spouse, your house, your ego, your career, or even your ministry. What is God saying to do – do that!

If God has called you to do something, to be somewhere, to get involved with something – then do that. Ignore every “if” and “but” and do what you are called to do. I planted Tree of Life Guildford when it was utterly foolish, when I had young children and a young church in Dagenham, I had no leaders, I had no people, I knew zero people in Guildford. But God told me to do it, and a few years later, we have a married couple pastoring that church who are remarkable, we have some exceptional elders, we have a worship team, a welcome team, we have people getting saved and healed, we have changed lives. If I had waited for the right time, I would still be waiting. The right time has not come, I made the time right. Seize the day, do what the Lord says, change the world. Everyone necessary to make that church glorious turned up after we had made the plans to move forward and do it. Selah!

Something that happens far too often to me as a pastor is something that is not going to help anyone walk in victory and actually hold you back. The story goes something like this (names have been changed to protect the innocent):

Jimmy wakes up Monday morning unwell, he has several symptoms that concern him and restrict him from being able to move or work. He is in pain. He prays, because Jimmy is a good Christian. On Tuesday, Jimmy phones the doctor and makes an appointment. The earliest appointment he can get is Thursday.

On Wednesday, still in pain, Jimmy calls me as the pastor, or puts a prayer request on the website, or email, or one of our WhatsApp groups. The prayer request goes something like this: “I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, I am in pain and have a number of symptoms, but can you all pray for me that I get a good report from the doctor”.

I find it really difficult to respond to this, because the prayer request is entirely misplaced. The truth is that if we were living by faith in the Word, the doctor’s report would not move us. We simply would not care one way or another what the doctor’s report says. You do not get to walk in victory or move forward in faith through a doctor’s report.

Isaiah 53.1 says “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” It is the Lord’s report that you need to believe, and here is the good news. The Lord’s report does not change. It is superior to every doctor’s report, it is superior to every bank statement, every bill, every piece of mail you ever get, and every email you ever read. That is what you need to read, to believe, to conceive, to receive, to declare, to focus on. If the doctor’s report disagrees with the Lord’s report, then make a choice to believe the report of the Lord. I really don’t care if the doctor tells me that I will die in 24 hours, I have a report from the Lord that says I will not die but live and that is the only report I accept. The doctor’s report might say I am terribly sick, but I don’t believe it. I have a report from the Lord that says by His stripes I am healed and that is the only report I accept.

The reason we want a good report from the doctor is because we are so unspiritual we actually trust the doctor more than the Word of God. That is a situation that we must address in our lives, and take the time to fill our hearts and minds with the Word of God until we realize it can be trusted.

The report we believe determines what manifests in our life. So stop caring about the doctor’s report, stop worrying about what the world worries about, stop idolizing the NHS (you can be grateful for it, but it is not God and it’s reports are not God!), and start believing the report of the Lord.

Listen if you start believing the report of the Lord, what will always happen is this: the arm of the Lord will be revealed. The arm of the Lord is powerful, and heals all sicknesses, destroys all diseases, restores all that is missing and brings life. Real life. Health. Real health.

If the doctor’s report says you are sick, and you believe that report, you will start talking and walking like a sick person. Sickness will dominate you. If you rather turn to the Lord’s report and read that and believe that report which says that the Lord is your Healer, that all your sicknesses and diseases were borne on the cross by the Lord and that by His stripes you were healed, then healing will dominate you. You will start talking and walking like a healed person.

So, next time sickness attacks your body, and you need some prayers from your church, we are glad to pray with you. We love praying with you. But don’t ask us to make something as insignificant as the report of a doctor good because you are too carnal to trust the Word. Rather ask us to stand with you against those symptoms, sicknesses and pains. We will, and in Jesus’ name they will definitely leave. When we resist satan he always flees from us. That is the report of the Lord.

Please pray for me, but don’t pray for a good report from a doctor, I do not care. Not now and not ever. Rather pray the report of the Lord over me, and I will pray it over you:

Ever since I first heard of your strong faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for God’s people everywhere, I have not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. (Ephesians 1.15-23)

To understand the return of Jesus Christ, you have to start in the Old Testament, specifically the 70 “weeks” – each seven years long, a week of years so to speak – that Daniel was told about prophetically. The entire great tribulation and every prophetic word in the Old and New Testament about this final period of time after the rapture and before the Millennium takes place in this seven year period that is the final week of Daniel’s 70 weeks. The 70th week.

Now the foundation for understanding this is that the church is raptured before this 70th week begins. It is not a period of time for the church, it is for Israel. God dealt with Israel for many years, then after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God pressed pause on dealing with Israel and started dealing with the church. However, Israel is not finished with yet – they still have one period of seven years left, the final week in Daniel’s prophetic word.

The first 69 weeks have all happened in the past, before Jesus died and rose again. Then we entered the age of the church before the final week took place. But one day, the church will disappear. We will be removed from planet earth by the Saviour of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ. You see the final 70th week of years for Israel cannot begin until the church has been raptured, and God again begins to deal with Israel again.

This seven year period of time will be the worst period of time the earth has ever seen. The church will not be there, which will be the main reason that the world will be so corrupt and evil. But for us who are Christians right now, we will be in Heaven for those seven years, having the best seven years of our life. You have to grasp and understand this, or you will get confused. The amount of Christians asking me questions about is this or that the mark of the beast, when the mark of the beast cannot be something that appears until after every single Christian will leave planet earth. No-one who is a Christians right now will ever be in a position to take the mark of the beast. Anything that you could take right now whether it is an ID card, a chip in your phone, 5g, a vaccine, a chip inside your body, a tattoo of a barcode – that is not and cannot be the mark of the beast. The mark of the beast cannot happen until we reach Heaven, so stop speculating, stop worrying, stop spreading fear and start looking to Jesus and praising Him!

You can read about Daniel’s weeks in Daniel 9.24-27. In fact, you should read these verses, because in the next post we will start to go through this verses and see what is in there!

One of the differences between living a religious life, a life under law, and living under grace is under grace sin no longer has dominion over you (Romans 6.14). You see when you live under the law, the law is the strength of sin (1 Cor. 15.56) and the law wakes up sinful desires (Romans 7.5).

Ever wondered why a Christian can get involved in a horrific selfish and immoral lifestyle – it is because they have never really encountered the true grace of God and yielded to it. Nearly every time a preacher is exposed, we find out they were preaching legalism and negativity and anything other than grace. You have to realize this – preaching the law stirs up sin. The more we are free from the law, the more we grasp the grace of God, the more we can say no to ungodliness (Titus. 2.11). The grace of God… teaches us to say no to ungodliness. The law can tell you what is godly and what is ungodly, but only grace can teach and train us how to say no to ungodliness and yes to godliness.

Paul had a deeper revelation of grace than anyone I have ever met. He knew he was the least of the apostles and knew he did not deserve to be an apostle. But the more he grasped this grace, the more he “worked harder than all of them” (1 Cor. 15.9). Grace made Paul work hard. it never led to him sitting on the sofa missing church! If you are no longer attending church, no longer on fire for Jesus, no longer tithing, no longer serving the local church – don’t embarrass yourself and blame grace! Grace trains you to say no to sin, and grace makes you work harder than anyone else. That’s the Scriptural truth!

We started this series looking at what grace was, then we looked at the powerful truth that living by grace means you win in life. Now we understand grace and how it makes us reign, we can also find out that it makes us fruitful too!

The law will never ever make you fruitful. But the grace of God will make you fruitful. The grace of God will produce fruit in your life. True grace bears fruit!

Paul wrote to the Colossians and said “All over the world the gospel is bearing fruit” (Col. 1.6). When you encounter God’s grace through the gospel it bears international fruit! All sorts of fruit! Without grace, no religious works will work. But when you encounter grace, suddenly prayer works, fasting works, going to church works, serving others works, loving others works. We must encounter grace to be fruitful! We must encounter grace to walk in our dreams, our inheritance.

You see a sinner cannot under any circumstances do a good work that is acceptable to God. But once you encounter God’s grace and believe in that grace, and are saved, then you can produce good works that God accepts and that are fruitful. Those are the works we should be approaching.

I see a disturbing trend among people who discover what they think is “grace”, they get this grace revelation, then they stop giving, stop going to church, stop serving others, stop living for Jesus. That is not grace, because true grace produces international fruit. That is a false understanding of grace. It goes with a false understanding of works – that often leads to dismissing any insistence on showing faith with works (James 2.18) as legalism and wrong.

No – there is a place and purpose for works in our lives, once we have been rooted in grace. If we are not fruitful, we are not rooted in grace, not rooted in local church, and not rooted in truth. We need to get rooted in grace, but when we do – then we start doing works – it shows our faith to the world. Faith is what gets us saved, but works is what gets the world around us saved!

It is true that works will never make us right with God, but they do make us right with the world. We should be so rooted in grace we are fruitful with works that change the world. We should be disciples of Jesus Christ, praying and seeing those prayers answered, we should be tithing, giving and prospering, we should be healing the sick, we should be serving in local church, we should be propsering in our career. We should be living in victory.

Grace teaching has helped us all realize that there is a wrong place for works – we cannot use works to earn God’s love and favour or acceptance, we should not use works to impress others or win their praise, but we can use works to love people, to restore people, to help people, to change the world. That is the right use of works. We should be using works to walk in joy and peace and increase the joy and peace in the world.

Jesus said we should be bearing fruit that remains (John 15.16). You should be fruitful in your character, your conduct and doing works that win people to Jesus. That comes through being properly rooted in grace. Grace is always fruitful.

In our last post, we looked at what grace was, and realized it means God’s unconditional love and acceptance. Now we need to dig a little deeper and realize what it means to live in the light of God’s grace to us. The first thing that God’s grace means to us is that we rule at life. When it comes to life, if you truly understand grace, you rule, you rock, you win, you have it in the bag, you are going to be just fine!

That’s good news isn’t it. Let’s look at the Word of God to verify this exciting news:

Death once held us in its grip, and by the blunder of one man, death reigned as king over humanity. But now, how much more are we held in the grip of grace and continue reigning as kings in life, enjoying our regal freedom through the gift of perfect righteousness in the one and only Jesus, the Messiah! (Romans 5.17 TPT)

You see you do not win in life, you do not rule in life, you do not enjoy “regal freedom” because of your works, your brilliance or your wisdom. No, it’s better than that – you enjoy it because you are “held in the grip of grace”. God’s unconditional acceptance is what leads people to win at life, to be strong in the storm, to stand boldly with courage, to take risks, to help people, to share life with others, to give big, to live big.

The issue is this though: if we do not present true grace to people we make those people weak. If we preach law to people it makes sin strong and people weak. It stops people reigning in life, it stops people enjoying life. I need to say it over and over: reigning in life has nothing to do with your works, but only to do with God’s abundant grace. God loves you, God cares for you.

Have you ever heard a sermon where they are tying your reigning with your ability? It’s soul destroying. It makes you weak. You must love God more, you must prayer more, you must do more. But the truth is that our success as Christians starts with Him, and His acceptance of us. The Bible says that we love because he first loves us (1 John 4.10)! Loving God is not you working something up in the flesh, trying to perform to impress. It is you realizing how much God loves you and accepts you and adores you. The more you realize that, you effortlessly start to love God back, and you start to operate as a champion in life. The way you walk into a room changes, your life changes, you just are more confident, more assured, more fruitful. It all comes back to grace, but not just a doctrine of grace that you can intellectually assent to, but a true revelation of God’s unconditional love, acceptance and adoration that changes your whole life. That is grace!

If it doesn’t lead to you reigning in life, you haven’t discovered grace yet. You haven’t realized how much God loves you and cares for you yet. You haven’t switched the switch in your head yet to “I must love God more” to “I am beloved by Him, and that’s all that matters”. When you do – things will change so quickly for you.

Our prayer life changes when we discover grace! Prayer is boldly approaching the throne of grace (Hebrews 4.16), not the throne of our ability. I still hear people pray “I have done good this week, Lord, please reward me”. That is just crazy talk. “I have prayed for hours now Lord you must answer”. “We have gathered 1000 people to pray, now you must hear us Lord”, “we have fasted for weeks, now Lord you have to do this and that”. That is insane praying, it’s stressful, painful and inevitably fruitless.

If you approach God with boldness on the basis of your ability, you are setting yourself up for a fall. The day you don’t do well, you then can no longer approach God. You have tied your prayer life, your ability to fellowship with God, receive from God and move mountains, to something as flimsy as your behaviour. That will never lead to you winning in life!

Today, put your confidence fully in the grace of God. His love for you does not depend on your behaviour. Your prayers being answered does not depend on your behaviour. You walking in victory does not depend on your behaviour. That way you will not get depressed when you mess up, you do not fall apart when you fall apart. If you want boldness to pray when you really need to be praying, you need to come to the throne of grace. You need to grasp grace.

Until you grasp the power of grace, you will not reign in the prayer closet and you will not reign in life. It’s that simple. To live a lifestyle of grace, you have to learn to approach God solely on the basis of His grace!

One of my passions is that grace must not just be a doctrine we teach, it must be the way we live. I have a real concern that people are more concerned with dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s of grace teaching correctly that they do not know how to be gracious.

If you are the one with the right understanding of grace, but in every argument you go high, rather than go low and seek to listen and learn, you in fact do not have the right understanding of grace. Grace must permeate our lives, our confidence, our prayers, our relationships, how we perform at work, how we live out our marriage, everything. Grace has to be the way we live! The doctrines of grace must become flesh in our graciousness in our lifes!

If you think grace is an excuse for sin, a licence to sin, or God ignoring sin, you have not understood a thing about grace. Not Biblical grace, which actually teaches us to say “no” to sin (Titus 2.212). What has happened so sadly in many “grace “churches and ministries is what happened in the day of Jude – “some ungodly people have wormed their way into your churches, saying that God’s marvelous grace allows us to live immoral lives” (Jude v.4).

So let’s start by thinking about what grace actually is and how it can transform our lives. In this first post, we will look at what grace really is.

Grace at its simplest is this: God accepts you just the way you are, independent of your performance, your rituals, your actions. In other words, God loves you despite your worst behaviour and He loves you despite your best behaviour. Your goodness, your badness – none of it changes how much God loves you, accepts you and adores you.

The problem is that in most areas of life the world has linked acceptance with behaviour and performance. You start school and immediately your behaviour and performance are being reported on! Even with the best of parents loving you unconditionally as best they could, the idea that performance and acceptance are entwined starts infecting our souls. We then start our first job, and again acceptance and performance are linked. We watch the TV and the adverts tells us if you drive the wrong car, or use the wrong soap, you will not be acceptable to people!

Because of this constant linking of behaviour and acceptance in the world, it is all to easy to bring this into our faith in God, and our walk with God, and develop a religion of performance. We have to understand that is not the way God relates to us. God relates to us with grace. If you never did anything good ever again, if you burned your Bible to ash, if you burned the church down, if you never tithed and never gave in the offering and spent all your money on drink and drugs, God will still love you, accept you and adore you, exactly the same as if you lived 100% for Jesus! That’s grace!

You are accepted by God, you are valued by God, you are righteous, pure, holy. You are accepted, loved and adored by God. That is grace. We have to settle this before we can live a life of grace – you are accepted no matter what you have done, no matter what you are doing, no matter what you ever do. That is grace!

If you do not build that foundation, I could preach a great message on tithing, on prayer, on living for Jesus, but your mind because you are not settled on the unconditional love of God, would twist a great message into a message about performance. I say “lete’s share our faith”, and people who do not get grace hear “let’s share our faith or God will stop loving us”. If I say “let’s pray daily”, people who do not get grace hear “let’s pray daily or God will not accept us”. That’s not the way. We do not do things to be accepted, we are accepted, loved and adored by God irrespective of behaviour.

That is grace. If we do not understand what grace is, that God loves us totally unconditionally, then everything else in our lives gets twisted. You might have some good doctrines of grace, but unless you start to live a life of grace, you will never walk in victory. Unless it is settled in your heart that God accepts you without qualification, then you will not grow or develop as a Christian. We must understand and appreciate that God accepts us no matter what. That His love is without conditions. Then we are in a position to build a living genuine life of grace, and not a fake grace that leads to immoral lives.

The Greek word for grace is charis, it means a totally undeserved kindness. All of God’s love for you, all His acceptance of you – it is totally undeserved. You do not deserve it, you cannot earn it, it is not a reward, it is not wages.

A lot of us see God’s acceptance as wages, a reward for a job well done. Then if we do not do the job well, we feel that we have somehow lost God’s favour, acceptance and love. But it is not wages, it is a gift. You cannot earn it, you can never deserve it. That’s grace!

¹³ When Joshua was near the town of Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with sword in hand. Joshua went up to him and demanded, “Are you friend or foe?”

¹⁴ “Neither one,” he replied. “I am the commander of the Lord’s army.”

At this, Joshua fell with his face to the ground in reverence. “I am at your command,” Joshua said. “What do you want your servant to do?”

¹⁵ The commander of the Lord’s army replied, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did as he was told. (Joshua 5.13-15, NLT)

Moses has died, and now Joshua as the leader of the Israelites is tasked with getting them into the Promised Land on the other side of the river Jordan. The people have crossed the river and are camping, waiting to start conquering the land. The manna stopped and the people ate something other than manna for the first time in four decades.

Joshua left the camp to go for a walk – to pray, to scout out the land, to think, we don’t know why – but he is looking at Jericho. I can imagine those high walls were more than a major concern to him. He looks around and realizes he has no battering rams, no ladders, no trebuchets, nothing that can get in. Just some sticks, a few swords and a whole lot of inexperience.

As Joshua is getting closer to the city, he sees a man with a drawn sword in His hand, and asks a great question to ask any armed man approaching you – whose side are you on! The man says “No, I am not on your side, I am in charge”. We are here to serve God’s purposes in our generation, He is not here to serve ours. There is a sense that He is for us – He loves us and cares for us and will do anything for us, but there is another sense in which we need to come in line with His purposes. If we pick a fight with someone for carnal reasons, we cannot then go “hey God is on my side”, it does not work like that. The battle is the Lords and the way we win is join Him and His strength, and yield and submit to Him as the Great Commander.

Joshua’s response is wonderful. He takes his sandals off, which is a powerful reminder of Moses at the burning bush. You see Moses needed to know God was the great I Am, the God who could provide, the God who was there. When we first becoming Christians and start our journey that revelation is the one we need. He is the I am. But to take our land of promises, to win our battles, we need a new revelation – He is not just the God who is always there, He is the Commander of Armies, He is the God of strength and victory!

This man was no angel, Joshua fell on his face before him and no angel would receive that worship. No angel is the Commander of the Lord’s Armies. This is none other than Jesus Himself.

Not only that, the plan to take Jericho is one only Jesus could come up with. Walk around the city and shout and the walls will come down. When you come to know Jesus not just as the provider, and start to yield to His leadership and authority, and have a revelation of His authority, power and command, He will start giving you strategies to take cities, to knock down walls and to inherit your land of promises.

In the book of Deuteronomy, prophesying the coming Messiah, the Lord speaks to Moses and says the Messiah will actually be someone like Moses:

¹⁵ Moses continued, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him. (Deut. 18.15)

That’s a remarkable thing to say: Jesus is like Moses! Jesus is a prophet like Moses. The more I study the life of Moses, the more I see a parallel with his life and that of Jesus, and it shows me Jesus more. Right from the start of Moses’ life, there are parallels to the life of Jesus, pictures prophesying and pointing to the coming Christ!

Look at the beginning of the life of Moses:

2 About this time, a man and woman from the tribe of Levi got married. ² The woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She saw that he was a special baby and kept him hidden for three months. ³ But when she could no longer hide him, she got a basket made of papyrus reeds and waterproofed it with tar and pitch. She put the baby in the basket and laid it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile River. ⁴ The baby’s sister then stood at a distance, watching to see what would happen to him. (Exodus 2.1-4)

Right at this time the Israelites have been slaves for 400 years. 400 years have passed without God speaking. The people are reduced to slavery, and it is hard for them. Pharaoh is concerned about the Jews! They are growing in numbers and he is concerned that they could even overturn the great Egyptian empire (Exodus 1.7). So he decided to start murdering the Jewish babies. It was the first of many such attempts on planet earth to wipe out the Jewish people! The plan was to kill all the male babies, but let all the female babies live. The male babies were supposed to be thrown into the Nile and drowned. Moses, a baby boy was ordered to be thrown into the Nile. And he was thrown into the Nile, but protected by the ark that his mother made for him, he did not die, but that saved him.

When Jesus was born, there was a king ruling Israel. The people of God were under martial law from a foreign invader, and there had been 400 years of silence. It parallels perfectly. This king ruling over Israel, he was not an Egyptian Pharaoh but he was like them. He was violent, concerned about a Jewish uprising, and as soon as this King, Herod, was told that the Messiah was coming, ordered the murder of all the male babies. Both Moses and Jesus grew up in a time where male babies were being murdered. Moses’ deliverance from the Nile was a picture that the prophet like him, when he came, would be the survivor of a government supported massacre of boy babies!

Moses was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as her own. Jesus was adopted by Joseph and brought up as his own. Both had to be called out of Egypt – Jesus went to Egypt to avoid the massacre in Bethlehem, and Moses was setting his people free!

Both set their people free from slavery, Moses from the slavery of the cruel Egyptians, Jesus from the slavery of sin, sickness and death.

Both of them turned their back on untold riches and glory to go into the wilderness to set God’s people free!

Both of them were rejected by the very people they wanted to rescue!

Both were shepherds. Moses was an actual shepherd for Jethro, Jesus was and is the good shepherd.

Both did miracles. Moses turned water into blood, showing the power of the law to bring death. Jesus turned water into wine, showing the power of the gospel to bring joy and freedom!

Both were examples of the highest levels of humility,. Moses was the most humble man who ever lived (Numbers 12.3, and Moses was humble enough to tell us how humble he was!) until Jesus turned up who had the humility to become a human!

Both were priests, both were kings, both ruled over people who did not always want them to! Both started covenants. Moses brought us the Mosaic covenant with the 613 commandments – the law came from Moses. Jesus brought us the New Covenant with the new birth (it’s the better one – Hebrews 8.6). Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ!

Moses appointed 12 spies to go into the promised land, Jesus appointed 12 apostles to go into all the nations. Moses had 70 elders, Jesus appointed 70 others.

Both had shining faces. Moses washed his brothers, Jesus washed his disciples. Both of them gave up their lives to serve and set free God’s people!

What a beautiful honour for Moses, not only did he get to visit earth and meet Jesus in the flesh (it’s in Matthew 17) but God used his life as a picture of some of the things Jesus would do and did do! What a true honour! And how wonderful is the Bible to show us these powerful parallels and let us know God is always with us, and He still works miracles today!