Pastor Kent Christmas | Elijah Co 2023

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Pastor Kent Christmas | Elijah Co 2023

The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.
Psalm 9:9 (NKJV)

God’s Messages 💌

Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week.. Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

In Revelation and Paul is chronicling what the spirit is saying.
He would end the letter by saying to every church, he, the half and year, let him hear what the spirit is saying to the church.
And, uh,
I have come to realize that God is always talking We’re just not always listening.
But the godhead is fellowshiping. In fact, it starts out that way.
It says and god said, let us so they had a conversation.
And so I believe that The Holy Spirit wants to speak to each and every one of us tonight.
So many times over the years, I have preached a message and I would have multiple people come up and say, you were speaking expressly to me.
They all thought I was talking to them, and I wasn’t.
It was the spirit of the lord who was targeting them by the holy ghost and releasing a rhema word into their spirit.
And so, um, I don’t anymore, I don’t have a clue what god’s doing as far as, um, you know, I I went to the Sunday service to preach, and I’ve struggled all week and I I’m finally learning that, uh, the more difficult I have in trying to get a hand on what god wants to do for that service, the more spontaneous god is generally going to move.
And, I actually, uh, I I might have shared this, uh, recently with one of our groups, but after last Sunday, I finally told the holy ghost.
I said, okay. Um, I’m repinning because I’m not going to go into services anymore with trepidation and worried about are you gonna do something?
I’m it’s just a foregone conclusion that we don’t have to know beforehand what god is going to do.
We just need to be obedient to the hand of the lord and Uh, so I wrote some things down that I got in prayer today.
Um, some of these resonate very deeply within me per uh, over the last 52 years in fact of of preaching the gospel.
Um, and it’s it’s it’s humbling to realize for
all of us how much god has suffered waiting for us to get where he wants us to be.
And I’ve told the lord,
I said, I’m sorry. for the times that you have had to sit and have long suffering because you were waiting for me to get where you needed me to be.
So I’m going to take our text tonight out of a familiar portion of scripture This is in Philippines chapter
3.
And
Think we’ll just read verse
10.
that I may know him. That that has become my life pursuit.
that I might know god. hallelujah. That I might know god.
that when you and I crossover into the pearly gates, we will not see Jesus and say, who are you?
But I would say, that’s him,
hallelujah, that I know you. Oh, I know you lord.
and we embrace, but he starts out that I may know him the power of his resurrection.
and the fellowship of his sufferings being made conformable unto his death if by any means
I might obtain onto the resurrection of the dead. Now Holy Spirit
I yield to you tonight. And god, we’re not asking you to come down.
We’re asking you to elevate us and
to the divine holiest of Holidays that exist in heaven’s throne. And, lord, as we release the word of
the lord tonight, that every demon of discouragement would be destroyed that god every yoke would be destroyed by the power of the anointing of the Holy Ghost God that clarity might come tonight to our lives that we would lead this building encouraged by the power of the holy ghost In Jesus’ name, Amen, hallelujah, you can be seated and, uh, I honor our church for standing, uh, um, it’s frustrated me over the years that when we read the Bible and we have a test that the church does not stand like it used to.
So we’ve been challenging our people that when I give the text to read, they just stand up.
because we are honoring hallelujah, the word that has been made flesh in the house of the lord.
And there’s an anointing right now in this atmosphere by the power of the holy ghost. I can sense it.
Hallelujah. I believe that the spirit of god is in this place, and the lord is gonna bapt ties some of you with a freshness of the spirit of the lord.
And and I believe that there is a theme that is in this house that’s gonna run through a thread of every service because when you leave this this conference, I with all of my spirit, I believe that there are new graces and new anointings and new mantos that you’ve never walked in in your entire life that god is going to mantle you with by the power of the Holy Spirit, hallelujah.
And so I wanna talk to you about resurrection and, uh, but gonna have to back up here, and we’re gonna have to embrace the the story of suffering.
And we we have such a struggle with trying to wrap our minds around a loving god that would allow us to go through such painful times.
And unless you know god by the spirit, you will become bitter and angry at the lord.
That’s right. There are many of you in this room that have went through battles of cancer.
many of us have buried loved ones.
I’ve preached my own son’s funeral just a year and a half ago when after believing that he would be raised from the dead and crawling up on his lifeless body and believing that god would do it.
And many of you have gone through great reject rejection, and some of you are ministers who have paid such high prices for the gospel of Jesus Christ and yet you have not seen the harvests that you have believed for.
And then the other difficulty is watching people who are less dedicated and less committed and wants them achieve the levels of success that you have believed for and yet it has not happened.
that’s right. Paul writes here and no one was more qualified to write about frame because the lord from the very beginning told, I think, ananias or he was born up.
He said, tell him how much great suffering, he shall have to endure for my namesake.
There is no shortcut through the anointing of the Holy Ghost.
There is no fast pass to the anointing of god getting a hold of your life.
Why do we suffer? Because it’s in the midst of suffering that you learn how to fellowship with the lord.
It is not on the mountain top. It’s in the midst of destroying it. It’s in the midst of disappointment.
It’s in the midst of failure. It’s in the midst of bankruptcy.
It’s seems like that the spirit of god settles down and you meet god face to face.
And in the fire of adversity.
You learn how to embrace the king of kings and the lord of lords until you can finally say.
I don’t love you for your power. I don’t love you for your gifts.
Uh, I love you because you are my father.
We don’t honor god for what he’s done.
We honor him because he is our father. and fellowship is not birth on the mountain.
It’s birthed in the valley.
When you think of your walk with god, most of us that have been in service for the lord for a long time.
Our minds will go back to the low moments.
that yay, though I walked through the valley and the shadow of death, he was with me.
Yes. I agree with you that he did not forsake me.
It’s in the moments of fellowship, the suffering that we go through that god begins to develop in us the ability to hear the voice of the lord.
And, um, everybody wants to reign with god.
But it says this, if we’re gonna rain with him, you’re gonna have to suffer with him.
And that is one of the biggest exclusions that the pulpit in America has left out in the gospel is that we raised up a generation of believers that thought if you suffered, you were out of the will of god, or there was sin in your life.
But I can tell you this.
The ones that god loves the most are the ones that go through the hottest fires because it is in the fires of suffering that god begins to burn out your greatest enemy, not the devil, but self.
When great men who do great things, start believing they’re great.
They stop doing great things.
When great men or women do great things.
Start believing that they’re great. They stop doing Great things.
Samuel Anointed 2 kings.
The same anointing that came on Saul came on David.
The difference was and Samuel looked at Saul, and he said this, when you were little in your own eyes, god could make you king.
This is what the word little means in the original.
This is what Saul is Samuel saying to Saul.
When you were unimportant, when you were insignificant and when you load yourself, god was able to make you king.
But when you became lifted up, god took the kingdom back away from you and gave it to a man who was after god’s own heart.
hallelujah. The men and women that are gonna change the world, they god has reserved as the remnant for this hour, saith the lord, have battle scars have bruises on them.
Uh, know what failure is intimately, uh, have walked through great failure.
Whenever you follow a man who has never failed, you’re in danger of being disappointed because the found the foundation, uh, of greatness is somewhere that had to be a face to face encounter that I am not good enough.
I cannot do this. Uh, but if I rely on the lord, I can. Now, do all things up.
Do him who strengthens me. God is no longer going to put up with arrogance in the house of the lord.
Uh, god is no longer for only talented people.
The talents that you and I, whether they came easy as a young person or old, they still came from god.
Uh, but intimacy and relationship is something that god says.
Uh, you have to pursue with all of your hearts.
No wonder when they asked what was the greatest commandments of all.
He said, thou shall love the lord thy god, with all thy heart.
With all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength.
If and the scripture here is very plain and saying it is taking place.
Says, if we are buried with him, in the lightness of his death.
I hate death. God never put anything in any human being that is able to deal with death.
I I I met death for the first time waking up at Christmas time as a twelve year old boy and my thirty eight year old father who was the love of my life had passed.
And so we I grew up. I watched what it did in our home.
I watched what it did to my mom and put her in depression and death death takes no prisoners.
And many of you have experienced those sayings And the Bible says this that the very first thing that Jesus did at Calvary was he went down into hell, and he got ahold of death.
He looked at him and said, I’m taking authority over you.
He didn’t destroy him, but he stripped him of his authority.
And when he came up out of the grave, he said, I had the keys to death, to hell, and to the grave.
And so the enemy cannot kill you.
I just finished with the book of Job, and it’s such an incredible book.
And the lord at the end, he indicts Job’s 3 fringe because he said, you did not speak truth about me.
But he didn’t say that about Joe.
He said, you spoke of me, but you didn’t have knowledge.
but he
didn’t say you didn’t speak truth.
And he began to unveil himself as he sits in this dissertation and and Job is in this euphoria because god is talking to him again after all of these months.
And in the midst of maggots they say coming out of his skin and the smell of death all over him.
God comes down to the midst of that stink because he smells the fragrance of worship.
me now of a man who is almost wished he could be dead, and god begins to speak to him, and he begins to Scribe his majesty, and Fanny Job says, oh, I heard about you with the hearing of the ear.
But he said, my god, today, uh, I had seen you with my eyes.
Uh, may the lord begin to release in the atmosphere and apostolic vision and an open heaven that you have a god that is on your side, and there is a resurrection, uh, anointing that has been released in the atmosphere.
This is what I heard the lord say to me this morning in prayer.
He said, you tell him that the days of the grave are over.
that the days of death are gone.
You know what? The COVID thing was about.
It was about burying the church.
sort of was.
They could put trappings of health issues and and all kinds of things, but this was a concentrated effort of hell to shut the church down.
So that’s not really true. It is true because they didn’t shut down porno houses.
They didn’t shut down Walmart. They didn’t shut down liquor stores. They didn’t shut down Home Depot.
They call them essential businesses.
But when it came to the church, they dug a grave and they stuck us in it.
and the health organization said we’ll put you in jail if you have church.
Thank god hallelujah that on 3rd day that that a declaration of heaven, uh, to the people of the lord.
Uh, and God was saying, uh, if you’re buried with me, uh, in the light to my death, uh, that you automatically gotta come up out of the grave, uh, in the likeness of my resurrection.
Sometimes we have that song singing our church.
Ain’t no grieve. gonna hold my body down. hallelujah.
many of you wonder, lord, why have I gone through so much?
Because the Bible says that when we’re buried in the likeness, of his death.
You go back and you read the account of Jesus’s death.
It wasn’t a a headache for an hour.
Isaiah says, I can’t even describe it.
He says he was more than any other man.
Doctors have used medical knowledge to describe what the physical side what Jesus endured, and most of them say he died of a broken heart.
And they tell everything that happened as the body began to shut down The emotional side, the spiritual side of his death was the worst was because the men that he had poured into for three and a half years that he has penned all of his prophetic hopes on are now cursing him and running from him and deserting him except for John.
And then they began to torture him and the the innocence of who Jesus was was had to be difficult when they took all of his clothes off and they’ve got him bare naked on a cross.
And the whole world is looking at him in his nakedness and he and all of his shame.
No wonder the Bible talks about his shame and all of those things.
If you wanna ascend to the heights
with Christ, You gotta go to the depths.
That’s right. If you are not willing to be all in.
You will never have all of him. Wow. It’s right.
Because god is gonna bring you through a place to where it looks like it’s never going to change.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel if there is, it’s a train.
But death is only for 3 days.
Amen.
We’re in the 3rd day. Hallelujah.
This remnant not just in this room, but in the earth.
One of the things the devil has done to us is he has isolated us from other brothers and sisters around the world.
There are powerful churches, much more powerful than other countries.
for the David Odedepo in Nigeria has 50,000 people
just in his actual building.
He built a church in 1 year of the houses 50,000 people And when you watch him have church, they’re all in suits and ties and dressed up.
And the guy preaches for 2 solid hours. and there’s signs and wonders and miracles happening.
It’s all over the world. There is a remnant.
But there is probably no nation that sin has snuck in the back door on more than the United States of America.
He said, but what about Saudi Arabia or or Iraq or Iran Muslim Countries or all of these places?
But they never were founded on the foundation of Jesus Christ.
There is no history of the Zeus Street in those places. That’s what they’re known for.
But in this nation, because we are the only nation that chose Jesus. Uh, that god has declared prophetically.
Uh, that this nation, hallelujah, is going to release every sirch and some of the manifested glory of god in the atmosphere.
And you can’t stop at the we are coming out We are coming out of the grave by the power of god.
hallelujah.
But purpose suffering is about planting our purpose.
That’s right. That god puts purpose on your life but then he’ll make it die.
I looking back on my ministry, I died two times.
I died when I was
34,
lost everything, lost my church, lost family lost my children or my son became homeless on the streets of Nashville, did not preach I wasn’t backsliding.
The only thing that kept me going was my prayer life, but after a year of like that, God, supernaturally, ushered me into the office of the prophet.
I never saw it, never was raised around it, didn’t know what it was the very first time that it ever hit me.
I’ll prophesy for 45 minutes and that was the first time that I had ministered in over a year.
But it was birth.
My prophetic was birth out of great suffering to where I sat with a gun to my head because I didn’t wanna live any And today, the ministry that
that that I have part
of my ministry that is prophetic came out of the level of great suffering when there was nobody around to encourage.
That’s why when I see people suffer now, I wanna be a blessing to them because I remember not having anyone to put their armor on me and say, this, you’re gonna come out that.
So you know what I did? I learned how to pray better.
hallelujah, and you will find yourself in prayer room
with the lord. And and as you were just overwhelmed with the things
of life, you would just draw night to god and god would draw night
to you and just even right now says the lord that there is a drawing nye in this building
that the spirit of the lord hallelujah. I released the spirit of god.
someday.
right now, hallelujah, something happening in the atmosphere by the power of god.
What is that that there is purpose. Be released. Uh, the holy things that you’ve gone through.
Uh, god said it was not to your death. but it’s for resurrection.
Now, that the seed, uh, that is sown, uh, that is put into the ground is not what comes up.
What you thought was over. Yeah. God says no.
it’s now releasing. You notice that anything that bears fruit doesn’t grow fast.
doesn’t plants, weeds, I don’t know how it is, but weeds can grow on concrete.
How may
I know that?
Look at my driveway. I got concrete driveway.
and weeds are growing up out of the concrete.
Think, my god, how can that be?
because they don’t produce any fruit.
Anything that produces fruit takes several years of growth before the first fruit ever comes on it.
You can go by and see a beautiful tree that’s maybe 7, 8 feet tall, and it’s in green foliage.
And you say, what is it? They go, that’s a peach tree. So why aren’t any peaches on it?
Well, it’s too young yet.
And see, just because you’re not operating your purpose doesn’t mean that there is no fruit in your DNA.
Hallelujah. hallelujah.
you have to trust god.
The other time that I died, In fact, my family basically died with me when resting place, which is our church for 16 years, we had an uprising and it was a horrible night.
It came unexpected, and there was such accusations made.
And I remember just standing there with tears rolling down my face, and I was saying, how how can we fix this?
And they said, well, you can’t. And all I had done was give
$153,000
to missions. And when it was all over, we were down to about sixty five people And I can’t tell you it took everything in me to come back to church next Sunday morning and stand in the pulpit and preach without letting that spirit get loose and the people in the sheep And I thought, gone and I can tell you this.
I died. I got in the car and truck, and I drove home.
And I saw like a child, and I told him, oh, if I said, I haven’t had this much pain since I went through what I went through several years gorge a young man.
And it looked like it was over and we struggled and the church stayed small and there was a heaviness and Wednesday nights.
It was lucky if I had twenty people, and I wanted to quit the ministry.
And I thought, God, I can’t do this anymore, and we poured everything we haven’t at this church and we are failures and then out of the blue.
Hallelujah. Resurrection. 3rd day anointing.
The grave had to open up. And god said he’s coming out and what came out.
More than what went in. Uh, what came out? What’s regeneration? Regene. Yeah. Regene. Yeah. Regene. Yeah.
By the power of the Holy Go stuff. I see god.
Now, digging up some grades, uh, and telling you, uh, you are coming out by the power of the Holy Ghost.
I could tell you this, the devil is a liar.
You have never walked a road that somebody else has not already walked out and came out with victory.
Uh yay. Enough fees shall be able to separate us from the love of Christ for in all things.
Uh, we are more than conquerors, uh, through Jesus Christ our lord who has loved us.
He fisions chapter 2 in verse
1920
says that the church is built on the foundation and the prophets.
Those of you that have construction knowledge that know anything about building.
You know this, that the most critical part of a building And the most difficult part of the building is foundation.
If you don’t get it right, the house is not gonna stand.
Everything is out of measurement. Nothing lines up.
and has the pressures of weather and time and the weight of the building, the foundation begins to crack and eventually the house is in ruins.
And so the part of the house that has to have the most attention and has to have has to be the most correct and the strongest It generally for a wood construction home, the only part of that house that has steel in it is concrete.
It’s the footers because the weight of that house, whether it’s a mansion or not.
Its longevity is dependent on the footers on the foundation.
And so the lord says that The house of god is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets and without saying Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.
I read today in Job, Jesus, or the god was spoke speaking to Job. He
said, when Whoever you, when the cornerstone was laid and the sons of god shouted for joy.
Uh, my god. that even back then prophetically, the father by the spirit laid the cornerstone Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone.
And when it was laid in the prophetic plan of the lord, the angels looked at each other and started shouting because they realized that the strength of that which was going to come prophetically down the road was Jesus Christ, him South.
So I bring up this scripture because
Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees, and he said,
your father’s
have killed the prophets.
And then after resurrection and Jesus leaves,
11
of the 12 apostles, disciples, died a martyr’s death
Why?
Because they were the strength of the house, and the devil was trying to get the foundation.
that the house of god was going to be built on. Wow.
And so he went after And now in this hour, this is what we’re seeing.
It has been decades since profits have come under attack as they have been in the last 2 years.
Now without when you have to say it, many of them brought it on themselves.
But there are also wherever there’s a true prophet, there are always going to be false prophets.
So you have to learn and a good much of the time, most of the time, when prophetic words are being released in the app, this fear over the house of god.
It very rarely has anything to do with politics.
because god is bypassing politics. It could be sensational.
We see all their stuff thrown out.
But the reason that there is an attack on the office of the prophet is because the Bible says and also what getting ready to swing from the prophetic of the strength of the church is getting ready to be ushered in the last focus will be on the office of the apostle.
And we are shifting now into an apostolic realm where it’s no longer.
God’s saying I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to the apostolic ministry is going to reenact.
Tallelujah what the prophets have declared by the spirit of the lord.
I have not seen, uh, Ear hath not heard, uh, what the things that god has prepared for those that love him, uh, but we are getting ready to stand and say, uh, we are beholding him signs, wonders, uh, and miracles, uh, are being released in the atmosphere by the power of god.
And so it is the foundation of the church.
that the enemy’s coming after.
And if you can weaken the prophetic and the apostolic, then you destroy and I would just sew this out.
There are no old testament prophets. All prophets should be under authority.
Hallelujah should be covered and should be answering to somebody in their life for balance. Hallelujah.
And maybe Saturday, we’ll we’re gonna touch on this too, but Um, when the lord hears the cry of Israel, There is this cry coming up into heaven of great anguish, and it’s god’s people and they are being tortured and afflicted by severe taskmasters.
And the Bible says, you know, that Moses, I I think that Moses’s mama’s when he was a young boy probably would sit him on her knee and say, you’re special.
Let me tell you what happened when you were born, and and they were supposed to kill you.
And I hid you, and you are floating in the river, and then the guy that was supposed to kill you, his daughter found you and god just worked it out to where the guy who’s supposed to kill you became your daddy and he raised you in his own house and nurtured you and took care of you.
You are special and god’s gonna use you to deliver his people and it got in Moses.
And when the day came that Moses decides that
I have this great purpose on me, and I’m gonna do what god’s called me to do, and it ends and absolute disaster because it’s out of the timing of god.
And the reason it’s out of the timing of god is because God doesn’t need a king to deliver Israel.
He needs a shepherd.
Right. Right.
And Moses is destined to be a king and god said, I can’t use you if you’re a king.
I need you to be a shepherd.
So disaster looks like happens in Moses’s life. Everything blows up.
He runs from home he’s running for his life.
He winds up in the backside of the desert, meets his father-in-law.
And his father-in-law says he want a 10 sheet.
and now god strategically takes the man who thought he would be king to deliver Israel and turns him into a shepherd because god said you’re gonna lead my sheep
into victory sometimes
so we know when we have a call of god on our you can sense it.
I knew by the time I was 13 or 14 that I
was supposed to preach. and I did one preach. I’d seen
and my estimate and all preachers were broke.
Had little churches. Nothing but heartache.
And, um, that that’s not for me.
I wanted to be a con a a carpenter and build houses and did it through high and things like that.
But when I was seventeen years old, I had a divine encounter with the lord that night, I told the
lord I would preach. And from the age of seventeen, I began to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.
But
when we have the purpose on us, then we think we know what we’re supposed to be.
and what we’re supposed to do. That is where suffering comes in.
because god will allow you to go through a process to where you finally lose all hope in yourself.
And then out of the blue, You know, it’s it’s very funny.
I’m I’m always we we always tell profit Jane, apostle Jane, how much we love her because
we tried to do this for several years, and we’d have our conferences and, uh, Saturday night and and Sunday.
And I couldn’t get my own church company. Really?
Saturday night, you know, our church said about comfortably
250,
and Saturday night come, and I none of my elders were there. Some of my leaders weren’t there.
We’d have, like, sixty people. And first

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