In the book of Romans 8:37, the Bible says: “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” We, meaning not all of us. Not every inhabitant of the earth are more than conquerors. This does not involve every human on earth. It talks about a segment of us, a set of us, a people who have an attachment to Christ and by the reason of this attachment, they are entitled to what Christ is able to make available to them.
The Bible says: “we are more than conquerors through Him.” So, Him has therefore become the ground, the common ground for our collective victory. So, when you look at your life and you say “I am a victor”, on what basis do you make such a claim? From where do you draw your victory? What is the ground upon which you stand and you declare: I am victorious? So, if you are able to stand on the ground of Christ and declare that you are victorious in Christ, then Christ therefore become the common ground for our victory. You know the word ‘common’ does not necessarily mean something is useless or that it has less value. It just means it is available, you access it, I access it. So, when you talk about common or shared goals, it is a goal that you have and I also have it. Once we are able to have similar goals, we are said to have common goals, that does not mean our goal are useless or of little value.
So, when we are talking about our victory that is common, we are not describing the victory as a little or a useless entity. We are just saying that we source it in a common place, in the same place. So, when we are looking at the place of understanding in sustaining, the goal is to see understanding as the instrument through which we must sustain. It is not enough to be victorious; it is important that we sustain the victory. It is not enough that you get married, it is important that you stay married. It is not enough that yesterday, you are a sane person, you aren’t mad so to say, it must be that today, you remain sane. Whatever you enjoy in God today, you must enjoy in God tomorrow. God is the same yesterday, today and forever more. If you have a common heritage of victory in God, then there must be an element of sustainability in that victory.
Now, one thing that makes the devil to be completely different from God because the Bible says “whatever the Lord does is forever.” The devil has no ability to sustain what he gives to you. If he gives you a child, he can’t keep the child, and by the way, he has taken the child from someone else to give to you, so, he is doing trade by barter. He cannot create, he has never created children before. So, if he does that, he has done that temporarily. You can’t find anything that you receive from Satan that is eternal, it has time lag, it has timeframe. It is only God who has the ability to give you things that last, no wonder Jesus said in John 10:10, that “the thief comes but to steal, to kill and to destroy. But I have come to give you life…” so that you will notice that there is a dimension of life that He has that is different from what the world has. It is a life that is eternal, a life that is enough and sufficient, a sustainable life.
No wonder, there was a time we are doing Millennium Development Goals in the World. Now the whole world has come to the level of Sustainable Development Goal. So, in those days we used to talk about MDGs by the United Nations but now we talk about SDGs. It is not enough to develop; you must sustain it. It is not enough to be victorious; we must sustain. So, we are looking at understanding as the platform for the sustenance of what we all have access to in Christ. And so, even though we have one Christ, we don’t all have one understanding, and that is important. Now, we could have the same food available for all, but we will not be full in our belly at the same level. So, we can have access to the same knowledge but not the same understanding and yet, understanding must be seen today as a means through which we must sustain.
So, if you lack understanding, even though we all have the same knowledge of the Lord and the same God who is good to all of us, if we vary in the understanding of the truth, then we will differ in the dimension of victory we experience. Matthew 13 is where we will be dwelling on this evening, we will start our meditation from verse 1. The Bible says:
“On the same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the sea. 2 And great multitudes were gathered together to Him, so that He got into a boat and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. 3 Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. 5 Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth.”
“They immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth.” This springing up could give you an initial impression of growth. You know we read that place in Acts 20:32, apostle Paul said “Now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace…” So, growth in the kingdom of God is by the word. But now we will now differ in the dimension of our growth by the understanding that we possess on the word. The word is the same. That is why we call our victory in Christ Jesus a common victory. The word is the same as well. The same word that God says to you, He is saying to somebody else. But we are receiving the word at different levels. So, you could have all manner of reasons why you don’t receive the word the way you should. But in the long run, how you receive the word would determine whether you will really grow or that your growth would be a temporary or sustainable growth. Bible says because there was no depth of the earth, they immediately sprang up. Let us continue.
Verse 6 says: “But when the sun was up…” the issue is when, not if the sun, to show us that sun comes up every time. We were told in one of our meetings recently that as long as the earth remains, there shall be day and night, winter and summer, cold and heat. So, the matter is not whether there will be sun. You cannot pray away the sun. And the same sun that shines on you is the one shinning on others. If the sun is scorching and dying you up to your root, and some are not drying up, you must examine the place that you are based, the ground upon which the word that comes to you is planted. So, the excuse is not the sun. Verse 7 says: “And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them.” When you hear about something springing up, it is always a cheerful thing, it shows that there is a growth kind of. It is not enough for something new to start in a life, beyond spiring up, there is a need for sustainable growth so that there can be fruitfulness and sustainable harvest.
Verse 8-11 says:
“But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” 10 And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” 11 He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
Remember we started from Romans 8:37 that says “yet in all these things, we…” not everyone, we, a set of us, are more than conquerors through Christ Jesus. So, as many as are born unto God through Christ, they have access to this victory. So, if you choose not to belong to Christ, you could only envy our victory in Christ, you may not be able to enjoy it. Why? Because you have not accepted the Lord Jesus. You have not allowed Him to become Lord over your life just as He is lording our own lives. You have not allowed Him to become the shepherd of your soul just as He is shepherding our souls. So, your experience cannot be the same with our experience. Jesus, they asked Him: why do you speak to them in parables and to us not in parables. Jesus said it is because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom. And as if knowing is the main thing, you would soon find out, that knowing is what introduces you to understanding. You can never understand until you have known. If you will ever understand, it is because you have first crossed the hurdle of knowing. So, that is why you must expose yourself to so much, know so much so that you can have enough understanding.
It is like plant so much rice so that at the end of the season, you can harvest so much bags of rice that will be sufficient to take you and your family through to other season. So, you need to farm so much because Yoruba people have this saying about mushroom. You know, they will say no matter the quantity of the mushroom, it will never fill your pot because it shrinks. It has a way of disappearing while cooking it. So, what do you do if you want to have enough mushroom that would last you a day? You simply buy more of it. So, buying more of it means you are gathering more knowledge. Because what you ultimately need is not the leaves of the mushroom but you need them in their shrink state to give you something that is sustainable and that would last you for a while.
So that your understanding will not be little, get more knowledge. Because it is from your largeness of knowledge that you have understanding. So, woe to such a man or woman who has such a little knowledge because his or her understanding will be little in commensurate with the knowledge. That is why if you read Proverbs, the Bible says “the wise man is always learning and is always increasing in learning.” So, the secret of the wise is in their perpetual or sustainable learning. They learn sustainably. They have a system that keeps them learning because the moment you stop learning, you will start being a fool because understanding is the foundation of wisdom. Don’t just say “once I know, I will be wise.” Well, you may be wise if you know, but if you understand, you have more tendencies of being wise because it is your understanding that carries your wisdom.
Verse 12: “For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.” It is like you have knowledge and you will now possess in addition, abundance of understanding. You can call it abundance of revelation. That is why you cannot be stagnant so to say, you are either progressing in your wisdom, understanding or you are retrogressing. You are either moving forward or you are moving backward, you cannot stand on the same spot. So, if you are not feeding your mind with the right knowledge, then you are feeding your mind with the wrong knowledge. For examples, our family members or relatives who does not have formal education have some knowledge. They don’t know the things you know, but they do know something you don’t know. So, the things you know have been producing the life that you are living and the things they know as well have been producing the life they have been living. So, if you want to change their lives, you change their knowledge system.
Verse 13: “Therefore, I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” So, here Jesus is telling us why He speaks to certain people in parables and to others not in parables. Here we also see that the things you know can be taken away from you, and more could also be added as well. These people are expected to see, but they could not see. They have eyes, they have ears, and they have everything that is required to increase in knowledge and build understanding, but they refuse to see. And you can’t know if you can see, everything seems to be working around their lives but they cannot hear. So, they have the resources to work with, but they are redundant, they are idle. They have all the tools that they need to live a better life, but they refused to utilize them. So, Jesus and God who are wise and who are wise investors choose therefore to invest wisdom, knowledge and understanding on lives that are willing to learn and grow in understanding.
It is like having someone who is always eager to learn, then you are always eager to teach, but if you have somebody who is not willing to learn, you are not also eager to teach. So, your teaching is to the degree of the people’s willingness to learn. God does not have challenge teaching and releasing understanding and wisdom to us, but we must be willing to learn. The Yoruba speaking people of Nigeria have this saying that it is the child that opens up that the parents will carry up. You cannot help somebody who refuses help. They will also say again that you can take a horse to the rive bank by force, but you cannot force the horse to drink. So, God does not have challenge teaching you. The Bible says you no need no man to teach you, the same anointing teaches you all things. The Holy Spirit does not have challenge guiding you into all truths, are you willing to follow? If the Holy Spirit chooses to measure for you a thousand cubits, are you willing to follow? When we read Ezekiel and we follow the story of prophet Ezekiel, every time he was measured another thousand, he was always going and his life was changing, from ankle to the knee, from the knee to the waist, experience upon experience that is driven by his own desire to know. No wonder apostle Paul on his own said “that I may know.” Until you come to a point in your life that it is not about people forcing knowledge down your throat, you desiring to know, God will not be encouraged to give you more. And the Bible says to him who has, more will be given, and that is why they say as well, they, not the Bible, “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”
When you ask a poor man to come and invest in a business, he will say he doesn’t have money. Ask a rich man and he will ask you how much he would gain and invest. So, if you don’t have, you can’t have more. The same principles that apply to money applies to wisdom and knowledge and understanding. So, they are saying if you want to have a peaceful and enjoyable marriage, you are like “me I don’t know anything on marriage.” Is that not why you should go? Like somebody that said to John C. Maxwell: When I become a leader, I will start reading your books. When the man left C. Maxwell, Maxwell said to himself “the only reason why you will even become a leader is if you buy my books.” So, you are saying until you become a leader, until you become great, you will not learn. The reason why you will become great is because you are even learning now.
In the days of your obscurity, in the days when you seem to be out of the spotlight, these are the days when you should invest more in your own personal growth. Because it is the things that you have added to your life now, now that nobody in the world knows you, the things you added to your life is what will be demanded of you in the days and years to come. When you invite Dr. Bishop Oyedepo or any other minister to your program and they speak for one hour, the things they will tell you are not the things they are learning currently as they talk, it is what they have learnt in the past years and what they have gathered in their experience that they will come to share. So, the question is: What will you share with the world in the days and years to come?
When the enemies come to you like a flood what are the things that the Spirit of God will stare up as an opposition against it? You know sometimes we seem we have no part to play, have you forgotten where the Spirit of the Lord is? He is in you. So, the Spirit of the Lord is not lifting up a standard outside of you, he is lifting the standard up through your mouth and through your own hands. You say “I rise up and I speak against every opposition towards your destiny.” You are the one that rose up, raised up your hand but the Holy Spirit is speaking through you. What about a situation where there is nothing in you, for the Holy Spirit to speak through? Jesus said “The Holy Spirit will remind you the things I have shared with you, the knowledge I have given to you, He will steer them up in you.”
Every time certain things happened in the Bible later on after Jesus left and the Bible says “and the Disciples remembered that Jesus said it to them” they didn’t remember themselves the Holy Spirit reminded them, but they have understood it to a degree enough to be reminded. So, if you are looking at your victory in Christ and you are saying “I have nothing to do Christ will finish everything for me” you have something to do, you must know Him. You need to develop strength in Him, you must be rooted in Him, so that when the sun of life comes upon you, you will not be dried up from the root.
You remember that story in Matthew where Jesus said “anyone who hears these sayings of mine, and does them shall be liken to a man who builds his house on the rock. So, that when the wind comes, the rain comes, the flood comes, the house will always stand”. Note again, just like where we read in Matthew. It says “when the wind comes, not if.” Wind will always come, rain will always come, there will always be flood. What then happens? It says the house will stand. Can you truly hear something and understand it and not do it? It’s not as if the man does not want to do, but the man does not understand what he is hearing. When you hear something, it deals with the issue of knowledge. As you hear, you know, you become aware. If you don’t understand what someone said there is no way you can make use of it. It is not enough to hear.
But, for you to act on what you know, you must graduate to understanding. So, Jesus had already suggested that you will hear the sayings of man and then you will understand them, because that is the only reason you will be able to do. But if you now hear you don’t understand and therefore you don’t do anything about it, you will be like a man that builds his life or his house on the sand. When the rain when the rain comes, when the wind comes and the stream rose against the house, what happens? It falls down. What will you say happened to the house? The house therefore becomes a victim of the storm, a victim of the rain and a victim of the wind. But the problem is not those elements. The problem is the refusal of the man to build his house, build his destinies on the pillars or on the foundations of knowledge and understanding.
The serpent that came to Eve at the garden was not the problem, because that is the truth. God didn’t tell them there was no serpent in the garden, there was. The enemies around your life are not really the problem, because the Bible says “if you faint in the days of adversity, meaning that there will be days of adversity, if you faint, it is because your strength is small, your knowledge is little, your understanding is little”, therefore you faint. When the tempter came to Jesus, Jesus was not all about prayers, He had prayed, so He dealt with the enemy with what He has understood. The serpent said “you are hungry, if you are really the Son of God i.e., if you claim you have knowledge; turn the stone to bread.” And Jesus said “I have knowledge and understanding, I understand of course I know I can do this, but I also understand that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word of God.” And the Devil brought another thing, he said actually I know what you are trying to say, but I also understand that you shall not tempt your God. And the Devil asked Jesus to jump down. He said “if He cannot safe you now, He won’t safe you later” and Jesus knows that He understand more than that and the Devils says “bow to me, I also know that if I bow to you, I will get it” “But I understand that I don’t have to bow to you to also get it. I can actually make you to bow to me to give it to me. Why? If I can remain loyal and faithful to God then I will stand against you the Devil and I will retrieve from you that which you stole from men in the generation past. Do we understand? It is understanding.
When the devil comes to whisper to you in the night, he is using knowledge to bamboozle you and he is twisting the Bible and twisting things and using the truth turning it upside down to bamboozle you, you will actually fall victim thinking you are still in the truth, but you have actually gone away from the truth. But if you understand much more, you will be able to resist him, not just by rebuking him alone, by actually using the understanding you have to reply him. So, you can actually resist Satan via your understanding, beyond your current understanding. You think you need to scream and shout and do all that to rebuke Satan, but your own understanding could be enough. You can disobey Satan when you have understanding and you know that what he is asking you to do is not according to the will of God.
To also put it simply, your disobedience to Satan actually attracts because you have obeyed God and that made you to disobey Satan, like what happened to Jesus; the Bible says “and angels came and minister to Him.” You can’t be in tat state of disobedience to Satan and he will still be flocking around your life. Because you are denouncing darkness, light will surround you and darkness must go. Instead of saying you want to go to the mountain and spend 40 days just to cast out that devil, you could use an understanding to perpetuate that victory. Because what happens is that you go to the mountain, the devil has left you on the mountain waiting for you in the house, and you have also left the mountain. After 40 days, won’t you come to your house?
So, your victory can never be sustained on the mountain. You must build understanding enough, anywhere you can find the understanding from God. Get the understanding enough so that when the devil comes and the question is about when. The enemy will always come, but when the enemy comes you respond with understanding. Don’t respond with fear. When they told Paul a message from the Lord, not a Satanic message, they said “the owner of this belt will be tied and bound like this if he goes to Jerusalem.” God is telling you to do something and another man of God is telling you if you go this will be your experience and you are like “God punish the devil; I will never go again.” But if you really understand the will of God for your life, you will go. Apostle Paul said “I’m not only willing to be bound, I’m also willing to die” because God had told him he will even die.
So, if God has given you understanding, it overcomes every attack that could come your way along the way, because you have an understanding. You know what is the matter, beneath the surface. Everybody is doing something; you know why everybody is doing it. You know better. Knowing better is even dealing with understanding because if someone says to you “I now know better”, what has happened? You are talking about the same knowledge, but there is a shift in understanding. I now know the consequences of my actions and inactions. I know the consequences of my actions before I act, so I’m not surprised. What I see in life, I’m not shocked by it, because I have known what the consequence will be. Because I am a man walking in understanding. I know for some of us who have bee following the Evening Bible School, the Spirit of the Evening Bible School is not to give you knowledge, it is understanding.
It is not enough to know; your knowledge does not actually make any difference. You need to understand. We’ve identified that if a people are not willing to learn, God, even though He has all the knowledge will not share with them. Verse 14 concludes with:
“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, by hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: 15 For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart and turn so that I should heal them.”
The issue is that they should turn, but they cannot turn until they understand, so when they see, when they hear, they have knowledge but all that is for them to understand and if they can understand they will turn and when they turn, they shall be healed. So, if they lack healing, it is because they lack understanding. They lack understanding because they have closed their ears. They’ve closed their eyes; they are tired of hearing and they don’t want to see. A man who does not want to see God cannot force him to see. Is God a thief? When it comes from your heart to give somebody money, the person that has been given money by you is not a thief. When it comes to a man’s heart to collect money from you by force, the person then becomes a thief. So, God cannot give you knowledge when you don’t want to know, if God does that it makes God a thief.
If He does that, He is violating your own privacy and the right you have to the things you see and know. If some of us were God, you will even force the eyes of the people to be opened. You will force their ear to hear. If you tell God you don’t want to hear from Him again, you won’t hear anything. You can tell him directly or you tell Him through your attitude. The truth is, if you tell God through your attitude that you are not willing to learn, you will soon realize that he is also not willing to speak to you again. So, if you have not been getting revelation from God, it is not because God cannot speak or God cannot show you things, it is because you have gotten tired of seeing things.
Verse 16 says: “But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.” And the more these eyes remain seeing and the ears remain hearing, the more they become blessed and virtues, prosperity, peace, victory, advancement are added to them. Now let us go to verse 18, dealing with the issue of the seed and the ground they were planted in: “Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.19 When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understand it not…” So, we know that the seed refers to the word of the kingdom. It says “when”, talking about the time. At any time, any brother, any sister, even as we are doing now, hear the word of the kingdom and does not understand, can you see that clause there? See, it is your understanding that secures your knowledge and experience.
Because your lack of understanding would make you lose the experience. See what it says: “then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart.” If the man/woman/boy/girl now quickly gets to understand then when the devil comes, the devil will not be able to snatch away. Somebody would say I have been attending church since the eighties but there is nothing much. I can’t quote any passage of the Bible off hand. The truth is you have never understood. You come to church every Sunday and even during mid-week services, but yet, you don’t understand. You could be paying your tithes and giving offerings, as long as you don’t understand, the devil will continue to deprive you of the things that you have received. So, he will steal it from you.
When you get married to your spouse, you see that period, a man can easily snatch him/her away, but the more you get deeper with her or him, the more it becomes difficult for anybody to get you away from him/her. Because you have become one. Because when you were separated, somebody can just snatch you and when they get you then you are available. But when you have become one with your wife or husband, it will be difficult for anyone to snatch you. When they snatch you who do they snatch? They snatch both of you. But when they were separated, if you can get any one of them, since they are not yet one, then you have that one being snatched. What then is the essence of snatching a married woman? It means you want to marry the couple. Does it work like that?
When you quickly get to the level of understanding, the devil has nothing to snatch from you. It has become engraved into your mind and has no man can remove anything on your mind, they cannot touch you. The devil doesn’t have issues with the things you have heard, the messages you heard in the past, you will never go back to them. You did not even allow them to have understanding in you before you abandoned them. So, your life will be better if you are able to understand, even if you dump, you have understood, you cannot be denied. Jesus said to Martha, He said “Mary has found something that no one will be able to take away from her.” No one can take your understanding from you. People can drag and argue with you on your knowledge. When you understand you have understood! It’s like a pillar that have taken so many feet into the ground, it stands forever because it is so deep. So, don’t just know, be like those Berean Christians. Become established in Him.
When you hear the word “be rooted in Him, be established in Christ”, we are talking about understanding. Jesus can tell you something and you will be like “my life and react to them”, it is not enough. In a matter of days, you will soon forget them, so it’s better you understand it. That’s why God said very clearly in Habakkuk “He said write the vision and let it be plain on the tablet that he may run who read it” It is when they read it that they will run. But if they want to perpetuate the running, they understand. If you read from 18-23 you will notice that everything, the seed has no issue, it is just the issue of understanding of those who received them.
When the word fell among the thorns and the Bible says because of the thorns, the thorns sprang up and choke them; they were so choked early that there was no enough understanding and so they died. The one that fell among the rock, because the soil among the rock is a fake soil, it doesn’t have substance, it is not deep, it’s just a surface level. So, because there was no much soil, they started growing, so the growth was fast, but because there was no depth. Life transformation, change and growth is in the depth – the understanding. The more you understand the deeper you go and the more access you have to the water of life and so, the better your life also becomes. The more victorious you are. Yet you now say in all these things I am more than conqueror through Christ Jesus.
Christ is common to us, but we are not common in our understanding. The Last one says “the seed fell on the good soil and it bear fruit in hundred folds, sixty folds and thirty folds.” I am sure we want to bear fruits; we must therefore be a people of understanding.
It is a good time to pray!
