The following is an excerpt of a sermon I heard – it had such a profound impact on me that I felt the need to share it:
“I’ve used this scripture but I have never fully understood the depth of it until this morning. The Bible says in Psalms the 46 chapter beginning at the fourth verse.
“There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, The holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High. 5 God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved; God shall help her, just at the break of dawn.” NKJV
That word river there means there is a vein, there is a vein that flows and when He is talking about the city of God, He is talking about the Kingdom. There is vein that flows and moves in the spirit in the Kingdom of the Lord and the invitation is for us to get inside of that river and flow to that place where it says that the help that we need will come at the break of dawn. What He is saying is that the help we need will come at the right time, at the right moment, His way and it will bring in a new day and a new time in your life so it can’t get common.
Listen to me now, I don’t normally talk like this, but He said what it takes to be able to be in that river and ride in that river is - Forgiveness.
There is a level of forgiveness in the Kingdom that we do not model in the church. The forgiveness in the church that we model is called toleration. Where we just tolerate, people that have hurt us, and it hinders us from moving to that place that the Lord wants to take us that the break comes. The Lord told us in the beginning, He said the word for this is restoration. He said, I am not only going to heal but I am going to restore everything the sickness and addiction affected all the way back to the beginning and when I get through, you never were sick and you never were addicted.
The Bible says in Matthew 6:14-15
“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
The word forgive has 2 different meanings in that verse. It says if we will forgive others and what that word means is to “let it go”. It means to let it go not even think about it and not even remember it. He says that if you will let it go, I will restore you. The other word for forgive is restore.
And He says if you don’ t let it go then I won’t restore you. So we will just ride it out and it will become common and we won’t ever meet that break of dawn.
But there is a river that is flowing in the spirit and it’s for us to ride it out to that break of day and we cannot ride it out with toleration and we cannot ride it out with unforgiveness.
I heard a man say one day, he said, I had a bad habit of leaving my clothes on the floor. My wife kept getting on to me so I picked them up one day, I picked up my clothes and she came to me and she was so proud of me because I had picked up my clothes off the floor. He said to her, would you forgive me for not doing that, not picking up my clothes.
She said, yes I forgive you.
The next day she came and his clothes were on the floor.
She said, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it - you can’t help but leave your clothes on the floor.
And he said, now see you didn’t forgive me. Because if you forgave me, then this is the first time I’ve ever done that.
Listen to what God is saying, this level of forgiveness in the kingdom in that river that rises to the break of day means that you let it go and you don’t remember it and it never happened.
When the Bible says, if someone smites you on the cheek, to turn the other cheek, and we tolerate it and when somebody slaps one cheek, we puff up and turn the other one because we think it is our duty to turn our cheek. All the while we are thinking, you just slapped the first one, you slap the next one and I’m coming after you.
The reason why when he slaps one cheek that we can turn the other cheek, you know why you can do that in the kingdom? It is because you forgot that he slapped the first cheek. That is the level of forgiveness that is found in the spirit in the kingdom that will take us to a revelation and a breakthrough that we have never seen before.
This right here is the groundwork, the ground floor, there is so much more that is available for us, but we have to get past toleration. We have to let it go, and we have to forgive and if someone hurt you yesterday and you forgave them and they walk in today and hurt you again today, this is the first time they ever hurt you.
That can only come in the spirit in a relationship with the Lord. That is a call for us to come to a place in Him. You want to be healed, you want to be delivered, you want to see your children saved, you want to see the spirit of the Lord run through your home and through your family like a rushing mighty wind like the day of Pentecost? Then let’s stop remembering, let’s forget and let’s forgive and let’s allow Holy Spirit to take it.
Let us not let this become common.”
Johnny Taylor
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