We continue today on the subject of financial prosperity, leading up to a teaching under the heading of the mantle of prosperity. And today we're going to look at the subject, removing financial blockages. Now we've looked at the anointing that God provides.

We've looked at the laws of financial prosperity. And one would think it's quite a simple process, just apply the principles, obey the laws, and prosperity will abound. Experience shows us that this is just not true.

Somehow, something seems to go wrong along the way. And financial prosperity just doesn't come as easily as we expected it to. So I'd like to look today at those factors that block our financial blessing and our prosperity.

And there are three main areas that we need to consider. The first is your own heart. The second is other people.

And the third is our enemy, the devil. So I'm going to look at each of these in a bit of detail today. And let's examine some of the problems that we face that block our financial provision.

And see if we can find a way of dealing with these and overcoming them so that the financial flow is released. Let's look first at the blockages that come from your own heart. When God first created humanity, he placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

There was an abundance of everything. There was no lack whatsoever. There was no limitation.

There were no restrictions. There were no diets. There was no accumulation and storing up.

Everything just came in abundance. And then something went wrong. That something that went wrong is known as the original sin.

And theologians use the term original sin to describe not only the original sin that Adam and Eve committed, but the effects of that original sin, not only on them, but on everybody who descended from them, which includes us. Us. The moment they sin, they lost the blessing.

Now, it's not so much that God was punishing them because they were bad. Their sin actually prevented God from blessing them. He wanted to bless them, but he couldn't any longer, partly because included in that blessing was the Tree of Life, which if they had eaten, they would have continually remained in a state of sin.

God needed a way to get them out of that. But they lost their guaranteed provision, and now they had to work hard to get the provision. God's words to Adam, in the sweat of your face, you will eat your bread.

I wonder if Adam said it before then. He didn't need to. He didn't have to work hard.

But God took away a lot of things. In fact, if you read in the book of Genesis, the main diet that God gave them were all the beautiful fruit trees. And then he said they could also eat the herbs of the field.

But the moment they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they could only eat the herbs of the field. All that luscious fruit was gone. Gone.

They lost a lot of good provision and the abundant prosperity that was their right. Now the seed of sin, it came as a result of partaking of that forbidden tree. That seed remains in all of Adam's descendants.

And that seed which we are born with, which we grow up with, it fights the blessing that God wants to bring us. Because God wants to pour his blessing, and he has poured it into our spirits by his Holy Spirit. And when he tries to release that blessing from within our spirits, this external shell that the Bible calls the flesh, it resists that and blocks it.

So our sinful nature blocks the flow of God's provision and our prosperity. Now that thing which we inherited from birth is strengthened throughout life by the programming that we receive from our life experiences. Every experience that we have in life reinforces that sinful nature within us and makes it stronger.

It results in us creating sinful habit patterns that eventually control us. God's blessing is prevented from pouring out. Now there are two fleshly habits that we develop as we live that life in the flesh.

The first I've called a poverty mentality. This is based largely on our life experiences. When you grow up in a situation of lack and poverty, you have an expectation of lack.

And poverty has been your experience throughout life and quite honestly, you got so used to it that you expect it just to continue that way. We call that a poverty mentality. Sometimes when wealth begins to manifest, we almost feel guilty.

I'm not supposed to prosper. My folks were always poor and struggled and they served the Lord faithfully and now I'm beginning to prosper. Satan will be very quick to tell you that the reason you are prospering is because you have given in to sin.

No, he's such a liar and we are such suckers because we believe it. And so sometimes when God tries to bring the provision, we block it by saying, well, I don't deserve this. I shouldn't be getting this.

This is wrong. And we deny the very blessing that God's bringing us. We have a kind of financial set point.

Now, when it comes to the physical, those who have had a problem with weight and have tried to diet know this physical condition which they call the set point. You try and lose weight and your body resists it. I don't know why the set point doesn't work the other way.

Shouldn't the body resist it when you increase weight? Maybe it does, just didn't ever happen for me. We have this like set point. We work hard, work hard and at last there's signs that it's coming down and then just suddenly the spendulum swings back.

And it just sits there. And sometimes our finances have the same thing. Just we're at the point where we think at last I'm getting the breakthrough.

Finances are beginning to flow. Sure enough, bob up. There it comes.

You come right back to your status quo, state of survival. Prosperity just avoids us. Just seems to be there all the time.

Why? Because of sin, folks. Because when sin was not in this world, such a condition did not exist. When sin entered, that's when poverty and lack entered.

Now some people and a lot of us, we swing to the opposite extreme. Instead of having a poverty mentality where we almost think it's spiritual to be poor, we swing to the opposite extreme and we have an insatiable desire for things. Not even necessarily things that you need.

We just need things to satisfy us. The Bible calls that temporal values. We become selfish and we hold everything and hold it to ourselves because it gives us a sense of security.

We need to continually buy new things to be happy. We just reach a state where it requires some sign of wealth and new things to make us feel better. Well, inevitably we don't realize that we're taking in the one hand and giving back in the other hand.

We get ourselves into debt through credit arrangements and we get that thing that we're desiring and it gives us temporary relief but brings a snare. We end up in financial bondage. So both a poverty mentality and if you like an over wealth mentality, the opposite end of the pendulum.

They are both actually symptoms of the flesh, of our inner motivations and they need to get dealt with. Now they can be overcome with God's help. Our mind can be reprogrammed with the word of God.

To do that you need a knowledge of God's promises and of God's commands and you should be meditating on the word of God to get it to go a little bit further than your head, to get down into your spirit and into your heart and become part of your unconscious thinking. And when you do that you begin to see things from God's point of view. And then you'll see that God doesn't want you to be poor but God wants you to worship him first and not make an idol out of things.

If you need things to make you happy you've actually used those things to replace God because God should be the source of all joy and happiness in your life. And that doesn't mean God wants us to be poor, no. The poverty mentality is as deadly and as dangerous as a spirit of covetousness.

They just work in opposite directions and both of them rob us of the blessing that God has for us. Most of these are caused by our experiences in life. They need to be purged.

Sometimes they need to be healed. Our bad experiences leave insecurities and fears. We're afraid to rise up and prosper.

We get angry and bitter and we find it difficult to forgive the people that have offended us. We need a process of inner healing and transformation. And it's a subject we've covered in some detail elsewhere.

The Lord doesn't leave us without hope. No matter what has happened to you in life God can deal with the effects of those bad experiences. As a result of bad experiences we have created habit patterns.

Things that we do without even realizing it. And these are the most deadly things in our lives because usually we're doing them without even being conscious of them. Okay, now some of these habit patterns were created as a result of something that I call templates.

An experience in life that gets locked up into your memory into your emotions and into every part of you that can get triggered at any time by a similar set of circumstances existing in your life. When you face a certain situation you trigger to a similar situation from the past you find yourself automatically responding in certain ways you find yourself feeling things in your emotions that just you don't know where they're coming from but you still feel that way. That's how templates and triggers work and again we've covered that in a lot of detail.

But then there are habits that are being created purely through repetition. You've done it for so long now that you do it now without thinking. A lot of the bad habits that we have in life we started out feeling uncomfortable doing them but after we did them enough it didn't bother us anymore.

Sin is like that. The first time you do it you feel guilty but you keep doing it after a while the guilt begins to fade. And you experience what the scripture calls having your conscience seared like a hot iron.

It doesn't bother you anymore. Perhaps you grew up with a fear of God that if you sin God's going to judge you. You're waiting for the lightning bolts to come out of heaven when you did that sin but it didn't come.

You thought well maybe God didn't notice. So you tried it again and you know what? Still no lightning bolt. Well you know maybe God doesn't really care.

Maybe it's not a problem and in any case you know if he's not bothered by it I might as well carry on doing it right? Sin becomes a habit. Okay now how do we change that habit? How do we get rid of it? Well it may have taken you some years to develop that habit. It's not likely to go away overnight.

It's going to take some discipline and some practice to do things differently because you're doing it now without thinking. Now the Holy Spirit can do amazing things. The Holy Spirit can create boldness where you're not bold and he can give you the ability to do things that normally you struggle to do.

So we are not left without hope. In these situations we do have a higher power that is available to us if we would just tap into that power and use it. I'd like to just mention that there's a difference between sinfulness and sinful acts.

Normal sin. Is sin normal? What we normally call sin it can be dealt with a simple repentance. When you become aware of your sin and you start to feel guilt then your relationship with God is affected and you need to deal with it.

Now John tells us how it works in 1 John 3 and verses 21 and 22. He says beloved if our heart does not condemn us then we have confidence towards God. In other words if our heart is condemning us we don't have confidence towards God.

A guilty conscience can block God's blessing in your life because you don't expect God to bless you. You expect him to punish you. Then John says in verse 22 and whatever we ask we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.

There's a confidence and a boldness comes when you are walking with the Lord and you are resisting sin in your life. Now it doesn't change the Lord. He actually does not condemn us and every time you sin Jesus is at the right hand of the father as your lawyer pleading your case for you so that you don't face the judgment of God.

But you see our heart condemns us and because of that we are afraid to come open and say oh father, oh Lord I ask you to bless me now. We feel well I don't have the rights and God's probably not going to listen to me. He's probably angry with me.

He's probably going to shout at me like my dad did every time I did what was wrong. We see the Lord that way. Well that's easy to clear if that's the way you feel.

Just come and confess your sin and the scripture says if we confess our sins he's faithful and just to give us our sins to cleanse us from all righteousness. Now that's what I would call normal sin if sin be normal. But there's a specific kind of sin that actually requires a bit more than just confession and that's what I call occult sin.

It's one of the first commandment, early commandments in the Ten Commandments. You shall have no other gods before me. Will you been involved in occult sin you've done a whole lot more than simply broken God's commandments.

You've actually given license to Satan to work in your life and it may or may not surprise you to know that Satan does not want you to prosper financially. So if you've given Satan license in your life and you're battling financially don't be surprised. He doesn't want you to be blessed.

So if you've been involved in any way in the occult you have actually opened a door for the enemy to control your life and so when you come to deal with that sin you've got to deal with your failure towards God and you've got to deal with the demon power that you have licensed through your sin. Otherwise you will remain in bondage. And so James 4 verse 7 gives us the best simple process of dealing with this.

It says submit yourselves therefore to God resist the devil and he will flee from you. Now I'm not yet looking at our third cause of problems which is the devil. I'm just mentioning this in advance because of sin because we're dealing about our own heart.

If you have at any time opened the door by dabbling in the occult then that can be as simple as reading a horoscope even for fun. Be very careful. It can be as simple as getting involved in eastern religions and yoga and a lot of the practices of these cultures that can also open a door to the enemy in your life.

You must confess the sin and renounce and tell the enemy to leave. That then is the blockages that come from our own heart. What about other people? It's possible for you to be contaminated not only by your own sin but by the sins of others.

Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 33 do not be deceived bad companions corrupt good character. We know that as parents when our kids start getting involved with the wrong crowd and they start getting led astray. Wrong companions, wrong associations have a spiritual effect in our lives.

Now if the people that we become associated with and see as companions if they are under a financial curse their curse will be transmitted to you also and your finances will begin to suffer. So how do we deal with this? Well we need to use wisdom. You cannot avoid people completely.

You'd have to leave this world to do that. We're involved with people all the time. It's part of our day-to-day experience and we can't shun people because the scripture says we should walk in love towards others at all times.

So how do you strike the balance between keeping away from their bad influence and still loving them as the Lord loves them? Well here's a simple guideline. You must never ever need or be spiritually or psychologically dependent on other people. The Lord is the only one that we should ever need and depend on.

The moment you become dependent on somebody else for an inner need whether it be spiritual or psychological or emotional if you need somebody else to motivate you and carry you through all the time and you're dependent on them you run the risk of opening your heart to the curse that is operating in their life. And this is a big subject, curses. I'm just touching on it here.

Where do the curses come from? Well the first source is family generations. In the commandment where the Lord said you shall have no other gods before me he said I'm a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the parents on the children to the third and fourth generation. The sins of your forefathers can affect you back to four generations.

Now the sin that's involved there is largely occult sin. You cannot be held responsible for all the sins that your ancestors committed but where they have opened the door to evil through any kind of involvement in the spiritual realm that is not of God that generational influence will be passed down and most of it tends to come from the third and fourth generations. Well most of us we barely know the second generation let alone the third and the fourth so we're not aware of the sins of our forefathers.

Sometimes however it's a part of a culture to even worship the forefathers and when that happens you can be sure that something has been passed down and contaminated and so you need to deal. As a matter of course we should all deal with the sins of the forefathers but then there are the curses of your parents. In looking at curses in the past I often omitted this one because I looked only at the curses of the third and fourth generations of the forefathers and as I looked at my own parents I didn't see much sin in them.

They were very committed to the Lord. They were totally dedicated to serving the Lord. My dad was almost paranoid against sin serving the Lord so how could I have inherited any sins as a result of his influence? So I skipped my parents as part of this thing.

I was looking to the grandparents, the great-grandparents etc but then the Lord showed me that there is a contamination that comes from your parents. If your parents in today's age have contracted COVID it's wise to keep away from them. You're going to catch it from them.

So it's not a case of your parents' sin. It's a case of the curses that they have in their life. Some of that may have come as a result of family generation sins.

Some of that may have come of their own sin but maybe it's just they were under attack from the enemy. There are many different sources of curses. As I said, it's a big subject.

If your parents were under any kind of curse you can become contaminated by the curse that is in them. The same way that you can become contaminated by a disease that is in somebody. So the best way to identify this is have a look at your experiences in life and compare them with the experiences that your parents had.

Do you find yourself experiencing the same thing that your mom and dad? Yeah, my dad always had this problem. Sure as nuts. I inherited it in the story of my life.

No matter where I go, I get treated just like my dad was treated. My dad battled financially. He was a hard worker but they never had money and that has been absolutely my experience.

Ringing any bells there? See, how do we deal with that? Well, we can refuse it. We can refuse that contamination because it's a curse. We can say, I don't want that.

I reject that. One of the most important things that I encourage every believer to do and I covered this in some detail when we did our seminar on spiritual transformation is that a child must come to the place where they say goodbye to their parents. Well, that doesn't mean you turn your back on them, have nothing to do with them anymore.

It means you come to the place where everything that you've inherited from them, you don't need that anymore because you stand as your own person in your own right. And so there needs to come a time where in the spirit, you stand before mom and dad and they may be dead and gone a long time ago but they're still in your heart. You stand before them, you say, dad, thanks for everything you gave me.

Do you have any negatives? Now's the time to tell them, dad, I was disappointed in you. I was angry with you there. I didn't like what you did there.

Let's get it out of the way, clear the air and then say, thanks dad for everything. I'm saying goodbye now because I'm going on with my own life with the Lord now. And so we wave dad goodbye and we did the same thing with mom.

That's the time when you say, I don't want the curse that my father had. It's not mine. I don't care how he got it.

I'm not taking it. This is one of the most powerful things I've experienced. Right up until the day my dad died, he suffered financially and my mom along with him.

After my dad died, my mother remarried. And for the first time in her life, she prospered financially. She was married to a man who was not struggling financially like my dad did.

It was there. It was part of his life. And my mom, she had her own hangups as well.

And when the Lord showed me that it wasn't my dad's sin that I needed to deal with, it was his curse. And I said, I don't want the curse that my father had. It is not mine.

I do not accept it. I loved my dad dearly. And the Lord moved me into higher ministry.

He said, I want you to renounce your father and his heritage. My dad had an awesome spiritual heritage. But the Lord said, I've got something different for you.

Don't accept that heritage. And when the time came, when I finally said, Dad, I reject your curse of poverty. This is not mine.

I renounce it. I cut the cord. I cut all spiritual links with you.

I will not have this in my life anymore. And from that moment, things began to change financially. My life.

You won't believe how deadly this is. But we accept it. We take it for granted.

Yeah, I'm living the same kind of life as my mom. Sure is nuts. That's what she had.

This is just me. I'm her son. I'm her daughter.

You don't have to accept it. You don't have to accept the curses of your parents. Well, it doesn't stay there.

You can also pick up curses from your siblings. Sometimes you have an older sibling that you really admired and looked to. Sometimes such a person can almost become like a surrogate parent to you, an older brother, an older sister.

Maybe they took care of you while the parents were busy with something else. That person begins to experience curses in their life. That curse is also transmitted to you.

And one of the strongest things that keeps curses in operation is anger and bitterness. You hold bitterness in your heart against somebody, you become linked to them in the spirit, and you will experience every curse that they were under. You need to deal with envy and jealousy.

Sometimes your sibling was treated with more favor than you. Maybe your parents favored them. So many parents are guilty of favoritism amongst children.

You became angry and envy and you were jealous of a sibling. You realize that all of those emotions link you spiritually to that person and help to maintain the curse that you're picking up from them. So you need to break spiritual links with your siblings because their curse can affect you as well.

Now, here's the one that a lot of people find hard to receive. You can receive curses from your own children. You know the scripture says, therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife.

The only relationship in life that is till death us depart is the marriage relationship. The child relationship is always temporary and has to come to an end. For a mother, that comes to an end when the child reaches puberty and needs to get handed over to the father.

To the father, that ends when the child finally steps out into their own life, career and plan and no longer needs your direction. If you fail and try to maintain that relationship, you eventually come under the influence of your own children. And as they begin to experience curses in life, which can be the result of their own sin, that contamination is going to get passed back to you again.

God says, let your children go. Do not interfere in the life of their spouses. Oh, that woman that my son has married, she has changed him.

She's pulled him away from me. She's manipulating him. It's none of your business.

Keep your nose out. Pray for them and lead them to the Lord. You dare stick your nose in.

They're getting involved in two dogs fighting. You're going to get bit. You're going to pick up the curse.

It's an operation. So say goodbye to your children. Your time with them is gone.

You are no longer responsible to carry them. You are no longer responsible to control their lives. And your relationship with them has to be purely a chain of counsel.

You're there to advise. They're not obligated to receive your advice. It's time to end that relationship.

If you don't, every time one of your children enters into an experience that predisposes them to a curse, you're going to pick up that curse. It's going to be in your life. These then are some of the blockages that come as a result of other people in our lives.

Let's look then finally at blockages from demon powers. When we, through sin, give Satan a license in our lives, we open a door in the spiritual realm to the enemy. Some of those doors that we've opened have been through our own sin.

Some of them, as we saw, have been from family generations. And some of them have been from associations. No matter the source, a door has been opened.

And while that door remains open, Satan has access to your circumstances. And especially, he has access to your finances. And he is devoted to making sure that you stay poor.

That I can tell you. Now, there are two kinds of poverty demons. There's a lot of demons.

And I'm sure a lot of them are associated. But the Lord has showed me, in this spirit, two pictures of the way some of these demon powers work in preventing us from prospering. The first spirit, when I saw it, looked like an emaciated, anorexic-looking kind of person.

Totally devoid of, you know what an anorexic person looks like. Like a skeleton walking around. Hardly got any flesh on their body.

This anorexic spirit blocks your provision. Most of the time, it uses the curses in your life to do that. And when curses are in your life, there are three manifestations.

Manifestations, theft, strife, and destruction. The moment you see any of these in your life, you know that a curse is in operation. And Satan is at work to steal from you.

Jesus said, the enemy goes around like a thief. He said, I came to have life, but Satan comes to steal and kill and destroy. Satan produces strife.

When there's strife, there's anger, and there's bitterness. We walk in the flesh. Spirit of God is prevented from working.

And as I said already, bitterness can also maintain a curse. Destruction. Things start to break.

Sometimes they're minor things, like just dropping a glass or a cup. Sometimes they're major, where the car packs in. These are all signs of a curse.

This is Satan stealing your provision. You just managed to get a bit of extra money in, and there it all gets spent on the car repair. It's gone.

But what is even worse with this anorexic spirit is all curses are motivated by fear. Now, if you look at somebody who has anorexia, and I know that the medical industry would like to say that it's a disease that is treatable. They'd like to find some germ or virus that causes it.

But at the end of the day, a person who's anorexic has just stopped eating, largely because they are afraid of getting too big, too fat. They've been motivated through fear to avoid any action that will cause them to put on weight. And so they survive on just enough to get by.

Now, once we add that to our finances, sometimes people are afraid to prosper financially. They've been told that it's a sin, that it's wrong for you to have wealth, that you should be taking a vow of poverty. Oh, Satan is such a liar, isn't he? Are you a spiritual anorexic? Are you a financial anorexic? Well, you know, I could make a lot of money, but I don't believe that would be a very spiritual thing to do, because the Lord has called me to ministry, and I shouldn't be worried about things.

And doesn't the scripture say that wealth is a bad thing? You know, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, and for a rich man to enter into heaven. Oh, we've heard it preached over and over again by preachers who ask you to give them all your money so that they can stay wealthy while you remain poor. No, no, no.

The Lord didn't say you shouldn't be rich. He just said when you depend on your riches, it becomes more difficult for you to serve God. God doesn't want us to be poor, but He doesn't want us to depend on wealth.

He wants us to depend on Him. And when we depend on Him, He will make us wealthy. So watch out for this anorexic financial spirit.

It's there to steal every provision that God has for you and to prevent you from prospering. The moment you put your faith out to believe God for finances, you will see the spirit manifest. You know what? It is a demon power, and we have authority over demon powers.

Jesus overcame Satan on the cross of Calvary, and we do not have to accept this. But we get convinced that, well, maybe God's allowing it for a reason. Maybe the Lord's allowing it for a reason.

Maybe there's a purpose in this. Maybe this was sent to teach me something. Yeah, just teach you to not serve the Lord and prosper and just listen to the devil.

That's what it's teaching you. Don't listen to these kind of teachings. Look out for that emaciated anorexic spirit.

And then we get the opposite. When I first saw this spirit, I saw this big roly-poly fat person. Actually, the best picture that I could think is Michelin tires have an emblem that they created, which is a bunch of tires wrapped together, this great big tire with small tires.

It's like a pile of tires showing this great big bulging. It's almost like a fat person. That's kind of like the spirit I saw in the spirit.

We joke about this. We call this the Michelin man spirit. Apologies to Michelin tires.

We're not insulting them in any way. But it was such a good picture, I thought. Now, the Michelin spirit, for want of a better term, it blocks the provision that God has given.

The anorexic spirit stops the provision from taking place. But where the provision has come, where God has released it towards you, this spirit sucks it up. That's why it grows bigger and bigger and bigger.

It sucks up your provision. It acts like a beaver that builds a dam to stop the flow. And so a great big dam has been built up of your provision in the spirit.

And you're saying, I can't understand. I put my faith out. I trusted God.

Where is the provision? The provision has come, but it's been blocked. It's been stored up and dammed up by this spirit. And when you can identify this, you can pop this bubble and release your provision.

You can burst the dam. And all that God has provided for you suddenly comes gushing out in full provision and full release. But you've got to do something about it.

You've got to use the authority that you have in the name of Jesus. And you've got to use the power of the Holy Spirit to come against these demon powers and to prevent them from stealing your financial provision. I just want to end on looking at where angels are involved, because we've seen how demons are involved.

God has given us angels to work on the opposite, on the positive side for us. And he's given the angels to be our servants to help us. Now, angels respond to God's word when it is spoken in the earth.

The psalmist told us in Psalms 103 and verse 20, he said these words, Bless the Lord Yahweh, you his angels that excel in strength, that do his commandments, listening to the utterance of his word. When the angels hear God's word spoken, they jump to attention and they act immediately. For the angels to act on your behalf, God's words must be spoken into the earth.

Now, we saw last time on the laws of financial prosperity, that words are the most powerful instruments that we can use. Words spoken into the earth go as a command to an angel. Now, there may be a time when you need to command an angel, but actually, if you speak God's words into the earth, the angels act automatically.

That's why the words that we utter are important. You know, the scripture says one day we will be judged for every idle word that was spoken. Now, that doesn't mean we're going to get punished.

It means we're going to lose all the rewards we could have had if we didn't speak junk. Watch your words. Be careful what you utter in this earth.

You're either licensing the angels or you're saying it's okay, guys, don't bother. I'm happy with my condition. You don't have to help you.

You must speak God's words. Okay. Now, since we are in Christ, our words become his words when they are spoken in the earth.

We need to speak words of blessing. And scripture says it very clearly in Mark 11, 23, one of the most well-known passages proclaimed and promoted by the Word of Faith movement. Let me tell you something.

Any person who says to this mountain, be removed and be thrown into the sea and does not wave in doubt in his heart, but is fully persuaded that those things that he's saying are happening for him, he will have whatever he says. Because the moment you speak of the angels jump to attention. You don't need to command them.

Some people think that we have the right just to command the ministering spirits to go make money for me because I'm too lazy to work. No, no, no. It's another story altogether.

Now, there is a time to command angels. And that is when God sends to you what I call a commissioning angel. And when he does, he'll reveal to you that angel in the spirit.

You'll sometimes see an angel standing, perhaps with the sword in his hand. Sometimes with a scroll in his hand, if it's a messenger angel. But a commissioning angel normally stands waiting for you to say something.

There's a reason for that. The angel has been given license to go and work on your behalf. But angels don't have authority in the earth.

Man has authority in the earth. Only what you authorize in the earth can be carried out by the angels. That's why when you speak God's words, you actually authorize them and they can do it.

Sometimes it's necessary for you to speak to that angel and say, I give you authority. I commission you and I release you now to go and carry out this task. You have the authority and you've released that authority to commission or license that angel.

And so in conclusion, financial blockages need to be removed. That's very important. If they are, it will enable the blessing of God to flow freely.

And you'll begin to live the abundant life that Jesus promised us. But if you want to lift your financial status to a higher level, it's going to require more than that. You're going to need the power of God to help overcome the blockages.

And you're going to also need the power of God to create what does not yet exist. Romans 4, 17 ends with these words, God who gives life to the dead and calls those things that are not as though they were. How's God going to do that when his word is sent into the earth? How is his word going to be sent into the earth? Through human lips.

Now I've often used the analogy of a boat that's in the water. And although the engines are running, it's not going forward. And the reason for that is that there is a rope tying the boat to the banks.

So that rope prevents the boat from moving forward. Even though the engines are turning and the boat should be going forward. Now you can release the boat by cutting the rope.

And when you do, the energy, the force of those engines in the boat will immediately begin to propel the boat forward. But it's not necessarily going to speed forward. At a high rate, it may just go at a normal pace.

It's been blocked by the rope. You release the rope. Now the boat continues on its journey the way it's supposed to.

If you want the boat to accelerate and surge forward, you're going to need to apply more power. Now if that power of that engine is strong enough and you apply it, you may even be able to break the rope. If you apply enough energy, eventually that rope must give.

So what do we do? Do we apply more energy until the rope breaks? Or do we cut the rope? I say we do both. I say we cut the rope and then put your foot on the pedal. So once we've cut the rope, which is effectively what we've been speaking about today, removing the blockages and taking out of the way the things that are preventing your progress, now you need to put your foot down, increase the power to maximum and surge ahead.

That's the positive side. Today we've dealt with the negative side. So next time we're going to look at the positive side on how to apply the power.

I'm going to finally lead up to the subject that we've been building up to, which is the mantle of prosperity. Now God's mantle is a subject on its own that I've preached separately and is available in a separate teaching. The mantle of prosperity is going to be separated and that's what I've been doing.

So next time I hope to explain to you more of how the mantle of prosperity works. We're going to bring all the pieces together. We're going to see how the power of God should be released.

And then hopefully we will have completed the series on finances. After that we'll be looking at another mantle. It's called the mantle of favor.

That has to do with relationships. So get ready for plenty more preaching in the weeks ahead as God begins to reveal to us everything that we need to live the abundant life. Amen.

Thank you, Father, for your word. Thank you, Lord, for each one that heard your word today. I pray that they were challenged, that they were motivated, that they were informed, and above all that they were inspired to press in to get rid of these things in their lives, to push forward and enter into the fullness of blessing that you have for us.

I want to just pray for those that are battling with curses right now. Those that have demonic powers that are arrayed against them. I want you to let God show you every possible area where curses have come into your life.

I want you to look at your parents and deal with that, as I told you. I want you to look at your siblings. I want you to look even at your own children.

See if there can be any open doors there that the enemy has that need to be closed. Now, in the name of Jesus, I stand against every demon power that is blocking the provision of your children. I come against that anorexic spirit that is blocking every provision before it even arrives.

In the name of Jesus, Father, I ask you to deal with the curses. I take the weapon that you have given me, and I speak judgment on those curses in the life of each person listening to this message right now, and I release them from that curse now, in Jesus' name. I pray for those who have trusted you, and you have worked, and you have sent provision, but the enemy has stolen it, has eaten it, and blocked it, and withheld it, and caused a dam in the spirit that's prevented the flow.

In Jesus' name, I stand against that dam. We apply spiritual dynamite, and we blow it up. We destroy it now.

And I command the flow to rapidly increase. I command a surge of provision to come into your life now, in the name of Jesus. You will see that God has indeed honored your faith, and he has indeed worked.

As you trusted him, the enemy will no longer steal what God has provided for you. You will go forward in the blessing of the Lord. As he intended, and as you desired.

Thank you for that, Father. May your people experience the wonder of your blessing in their lives. In Jesus' name.

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