It is God who works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose. That's Philippians two thirteen, and this is destined for victory with Pastor Paul Sheppard. We'll get to today's message in just a moment, but first, a word of thanks. I'm sure you know, destined for victory exists only through the faithful prayer and financial support of friends like you. Thank you to each and every one of you who have given to support this ministry, and we're especially grateful for our legacy builders, those partners who have taken the step to support us on a monthly basis.
Pastor Paul was always so grateful for the regular support of our destined for victory partners, and for the impact it's had on people's lives. I once spoke with. Him about that very subject, and here's what he said: I want them to know your partnership is very, very important and necessary. When you think about it, starting way back, I'm thinking about Moses. He could not have been Moses without the partners God gave him.
God raised up Joshua. The Bible called Joshua Moses' minister before it called him God's minister, and Joshua. Was one of those key people. Aaron, his brother, was one of his key partners. Every man or woman of God since then, all the way into, of course, when you get to the ministry of Jesus.
Jesus Himself required partnership. Isn't that amazing that the God Man needed partners? He took Peter, James, and John farther into the Garden of Gethsemane, and He said, "Just stay here and watch with." Me and he cried and poured out his heart to get ready for that moment when he would lay down his life for us. And he needed that partnership. He had Peter, James, and John.
He also had Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Then, when you look at the apostles, there is no Paul without Timothy, without Silas, without Barnabas, and on and on. All of us need partners.
So the bottom line is, I'm so grateful for every man, woman. Boy and girl, who has become a partner for our ministry, so you can keep on providing this platform, so that we can reach even more people for the Lord Jesus Christ. When you partner with Destin for Victory for as little as twenty dollars a month, we'll send you a few thank you gifts your way, including one of our most popular CDs, The Best of Let My People Smile. This is Pastor Paul as Absolute Best. Two things we know for sure: you.
We'll learn and you will laugh, and we're not sure which one you do more of.
So call eight five five three three nine five five zero zero to find out more about how to become a Destined for Victory partner. Make your pledge over the phone or mail your gift to Destined for Victory, P.O. Box seventeen sixty seven Fremont, California nine four five three eight, and you can also partner with us through our website pastorpaul dot net. If you can't be Become a monthly partner, but would like to send a generous gift to the ministry? We'd love to send you our latest booklet called "Before Qualified." For more information on this great new resource, please stop by PastorPaul dot net.
You got to break through and take authority over that worldliness, and say, "I will not walk according to the systems. Is where I don't care how unpopular it makes me. I won't do it. I will not dishonor God as I live in this world. He has called me to be in this world, but not of this world.
Apart from God, we are powerless against the enemy. We're sinful and depraved, devoid of anything holy or good." But once we put our faith in Christ, we have the power to walk according to the Spirit, not the flesh. On today's "Destined for Victory" with Pastor Paul Shepard, an important message about taking authority over your enemies, so that you can walk in the purpose and the victory to which God has called you.
Now let's get started with this message: taking authority over our enemies. Enjoy the earth. Enjoy it.
Some of y'all don't get out and see what a wonderful world God gave us dominion over.
Some of y'all, the reason why isn't some of y'all is not a spirit of despair. You just haven't seen enough to get happy. No wonder you sad all the time. You call yourself going to the beach in the summertime, and you talk about these beaches in Northern California. That's no beach.
It's no beach. Come on, some of you world travelers, help me make this point. That's no beach where you got to go. Is so. First of all, you got to wait and not step on certain things on your way out to the water.
Up, that's a needle there. No, don't want to go there. That's trash. That's toxic. I don't know what that.
On your way to the water, then you get to the water and you got to splash for ten minutes. It's so cold, trying to get, trying to get acclimated. And you down there, splashing a little water on your legs. Then you work it up some, put some in your face, and finally, about ten minutes later, you in the water. Oh, dirty water, green water, muddy water, murky water.
Come back to my child. I was at the beach. No, you weren't. Trying to help somebody here. Save yourself some ducats.
Get on a plane or drive far enough where you can find there is water in this earth that is not the color you have ever seen. Turquoise. Beautiful! Oh my goodness! You look at it, and you're just amazed.
And what that's there for is to make you say, "What a mighty God we serve!" That He placed us temporarily in this home that is primarily water. Primarily water. Go find the good water and get in it. When you go to the right spot, you don't have to worry about walking on anything. You just walk right on up.
The sands are wonderful, and you can walk straight on out into the water. It's warm. It's inviting. The water is saying, "Come unto me, all of you." Oh, you can go places. Just walk right on out into the water.
Just start swimming or floating or whatever you gonna do out there. There are places the fish will come swim with you in shallow water.
Some of y'all don't know what I'm talking about. It's true. Oh, he messing around? No, I'm serious. You go out there and you just do first few strokes and you see some fish coming along.
Hey, man, what's up? They so glad to see you. They know you're not from there. You're from another country. They come to greet you.
Hey, how you doing? And they just swim with you. Just hang out with you. All kind of colors and wonder. You can get you some goggles and just look at them.
Oh, it's wonderful. Take an excursion. One of the excursions I did on one of our getaways, my wife and I, they now have this thing called snuba, where if you haven't learned how to scuba dive yet. You can snuba, and what that is is the best of snorkeling and the best of scuba diving, but you don't have to have the scuba training. And you put the thing on because the air tank is not on your back like scuba; it's up on a raft, and you have a line.
And my brother-in-law and I, we went down, and we were down there, and it's amazing things.
Now they told us there's this big fish down there, and it looks like a barracuda. They said, but in this part of the world, it's not a barracuda; it's a very friendly fish. I said, thank you for letting me know. Cause I went down, my brother-in-law and I went down, my sister and my and my wife was just on the shore saying, "All right," you know. They enjoyed the beach that God created.
They wasn't trying to get down there with the fish, and we down there and the fish. And sure enough, I saw this long, pointy—I mean, mean-looking. I said, "But I found out about you. I ain't scared of you." But they sure looked apart. He looked like he said, "If I could, I'd tear you up." My point is, there's stuff out here for you to enjoy.
If you love the mountains, there's some beautiful mountains for you to enjoy. I'm not going with you, but go. I don't do mountains. I don't do camping. I don't get you folks.
I dare. We love nature. That's what I'm trying to stay away from—is nature. Oh, there was a bear in the campground last night. That's not good news.
When you grow up in the asphalt jungle, you don't want to fool with any more wildness. I've had my wildness getting home without getting shot. When there's a gang war that particular day. As when I grew up, there were days, and you'd hear about it early enough in the school day. After school, this gang is fighting that gang, and your job is try to get home and not get caught in the crossfire.
When you grow up like that, I don't need bears and stuff, but whatever you like, whatever you enjoy, do it. When the Bible says "love not the world," not talking about the earth, it's talking about the world systems. Love not godlessness. People now are trying to redefine everything apart from God. You don't get to define marriage because you didn't create it.
You can't marry any old human being and say it's a marriage. And I don't care what society honors it. I don't care what state signs approval on it. God will never change what He said when He said a man and a woman bring their lives together and they too become one flesh. What you scared for?
I'm the one preaching. Looking concerned. Did He say that? Yes, I said it. Cause the Word says it.
We love people of all orientations because that's who we're called to love and to serve and to lead to the light and the love of Jesus Christ. We do not stand with bigotry in any form. When people hate in the name of a deity, they are as wrong as they can possibly be. Wrong as they can possibly be. Nobody who truly knows Jesus and has the Spirit of Truth dwelling in them and has not been caught up in the delusion of modern day Phariseism will go out with signs declaring hatred for people because of some sexual orientation or choices they're making in their life.
Not the will of God. Years ago, I had a member who was into that, and I said, "Brother, don't you tell anybody out there that I am your pastor. I can't make you not go out, but if you call my name and I hear about it, you gonna have a problem." I went hood on this brother right quick, intimidated. I'm saying, I'm serious, man. Cause he loved.
He was with a group of folk. He loved going out there and he waiting find some little one to you know beta breakers anything where it's gonna be a bunch of folk and he go out there with a sign talking about who God hates and all that stuff. I said I don't even know why you bother coming to this church. Cause you know I don't preach any foolishness against like that. I preach against that.
Jesus would never support that. Jesus would never stand outside of places protesting. He'd rather come along somebody, come alongside somebody who's in a lifestyle that is not the will of God for them, and talk to them. He would rather find somebody that the Pharisees are ready to stone and say, "Well, if y'all want to have a stone, let's make sure all of you all are sinless first." And in case you have amnesia today, let me do a little writing. And you know, by time he got through writing, all the Pharisees and hypocrites were gone, and then he could talk to the lady.
And he said, "You know, if there was anybody in the world that could condemn you, it's me, and I didn't come to condemn you. I came to teach you that there's a better way." That's what the church ought to be about—not the business of condemnation. We're in the business of declaring there's no condemnation to those who are in Christ. Get in Christ first, and then let us teach you to observe all things. Let us teach you what the Word says about your lifestyle and the choices and all of that stuff.
Let us teach you. Let us renew your mind through the Word of God. And in the meantime, you're going to be loved in the whole process. Where do we get off? There's just certain things.
Won't you read your Bible for a change? All unrighteousness is sin. Who did Jesus have his most trouble with? Not people who were jacked up and knew it. He had his biggest trouble with Pharisees, with church folk.
Bible toting, scripture quoting, mean as a rattlesnake, out of touch with their own issues, full of pride, full of self, full of delusion, going around looking at other people, snooping around trying to find their sins, instead of doing what the Bible says, considering yourself.
So the fact of the matter is. If you get caught up in the world system, you end up believing all kinds of things, living all kinds of things, doing all kinds of things.
So the Bible says, "Don't love the world." That's one of our enemies, the world. You got to break through and take authority over that worldliness and say, "I will not walk according to the systems of this world. I don't care how unpopular it makes me. I won't do it. I will not dishonor God as I live in this world.
He has called me to be in this world." But not of this world. And then, what does the Bible say about the flesh? Paul said in Romans seven, in me, verse eighteen, that is in my flesh dwells what? No good thing. In your flesh, I don't care how long you've been saved.
As soon as you get out of the spirit, you can do anything. You might choose not to do everything. You know, I've heard people brag. Even in my sins, there were just certain things I never stooped to. Even before I got saved, I just knew I was raised in such a way, and I had a sense of.
Do you know that pride itself will send you to hell, except for the blood of Jesus? How dare you think there's something good about you apart from Christ? How deluded are you for you to think I was always a superior person? I always looked at certain people in my family, and I just never understood. How they could stoop to certain things—they just more in touch with their flesh than you're in touch with yours.
That's all, and they just operated by a different fleshly mindset, fleshly goals and values. They said things like, "If it feels good, do it," and you sat around and said, "I could never do such a thing." So pride. Was one of your downfalls, but it's all sin in you. That's in your flesh. Do I have no good thing?
I submit to you.
Some of you just haven't been through the right kind of thing to see what you are capable of. You just haven't gone through the right set of circumstances yet. I don't care how pristine you think your vocabulary is. There's a set of things you can go through where you will cuss like a sailor. Not me.
Okay, so you will yell very loudly. Darn. Shut the front door.
Some of y'all missed it. I'm gonna just move right on. They missed it. That's all right. Ask somebody to tell you after church.
I'm trying to tell you that your flesh is no more holy than anybody else's. Paul, under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, said, "In me that is in my flesh dwells no good thing, nothing good." That's the world of flesh. We also have an enemy called the devil. He's real. There is a being, Satan.
He is a created being, was created first to glorify God. In rebellion and pride and foolishness, rebelled against God, was cast out of His presence, along with a third of the angels. Let me tell you something: they're real. Demons are real. Paul said, Ephesians chapter six, verse twelve: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood.
You better hurry up and believe it. What you're dealing with every day is not the people you think you're dealing with. You're dealing with the forces behind those people, the forces agitating those people, the forces pushing those people, and using those people. We wrestle not against flesh and blood. We wrestle against principalities and powers, against rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
That means there's an army arrayed against you in the unseen world. If the Lord gave you a glimpse into it, it would change you forever. You think you're dealing with bosses and supervisors and mad people on the on the road, and and you just think you're dealing with flesh and blood. You're not. You're dealing with spiritual forces.
But what does God say to do? We got to do what Gideon did. Verse thirty four of Judges six: The spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon. How we gonna take authority? We don't have any, but we can operate in the Spirit's authority.
The Spirit of the Lord came upon him.
Now he lived under an inferior covenant. The Bible says in Hebrews, we live under a better covenant than they did. But even in that covenant, the answer was the Spirit of God. And the Spirit of God came upon him.
Well, if you're a child of God, the Spirit of God not only wants to come upon you, but He wants to empower you every day of your life. Not an occasional empowering. He's already in your life because He's the one who saved you. If you're a believer, and now He wants to empower you every day. And that takes a yielding to the Spirit and say, Lord, give me that authority that only comes from heaven.
I want to walk in it every day of my life. I want to walk in authority over the world. Walk in authority over the flesh. Walk in authority over the demons. Every day of my life, I want the devil to know I'm here.
You want demons in your neighborhood when they're cruising down the street. You want them to say when they're training the rookie demon.
Now, now that house right there, you don't want fool with that lady that lives in that house. She's praying, she's fasting, she's reading her Bible, she's declaring the will of God. She will tell you to get lost so quick you won't know what happened to you. Don't fool around in that house. Unless you take a whole bunch of folk with you.
And even then, good luck. That's what the demons telling their little trainee demons. That's what it ought to be when they come around you. They ought to know about you, even if they never had a personal encounter. Demons can know about you.
Don't believe me? Read Acts chapter nineteen. When the sons of Skeba were trying to fool around and practice authority and didn't have any. And they found a demonized man and said, "In the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches, come out of this man." Demons looked through the eyes of that man and spoke through the mouth of that man to those sons of Sceva, and he said, "Now, Jesus, I know, and Paul, I know about." Two different words for know. If you have King James that says Jesus I know and Paul I know, you got to go deeper than the King James in that verse.
Look at the Greek. Two different Greek words. Jesus I know. The first Greek word is I know him personally, intimately. He's the one who stripped me of my authority when he died on Calvary.
He said and Paul I know about. Used a word know that means I never met Paul, but I sure heard about him. The demons in that man said, "We never ran into him personally, but we went to demon convention the other day, and the seminar I went to, ten folk you don't want food with." He said, "Paul was the first person on the list. They told us how many folk been cast out by Paul." The demon that had been kicked out of that girl that told fortunes in Philippi over there in Acts 16, that demon was at the convention that was in her, and he said, "You know, I was having a good time telling fortunes and deceiving folk, and we were running the city, we were running things, we had it on lock, and we made the mistake. We saw Paul and Silas, and we thought maybe we should appease them." Cause we saw the authority that they walked in.
We never met them before them, but we saw the authority they walked in, and so our strategy was try to compliment them, so that they'll leave us alone.
So they walked around behind them for days. The Bible says in Acts 16, and said, "These are men of God. They declare to us the way of the Lord." Oh, dumb demons! One day Paul got sick of it, turned around. And in his authority, said in the name of Jesus, come out of that girl.
And that demon said, "He sent us out of there so fast, we never knew what happened." Folks, that's the kind of authority you want to walk in. You want to walk in spiritual authority, because that's what it's going to take to defeat the enemies that have arrayed against you. They're trying to prevent you from doing the will of God. Thanks so much for being with us for today's Destined for Victory message, taking authority over our enemies. To learn more about Destined for Victory's mission and purpose, or about the special gift we've got for you when you give generously today, please come see us at PastorPaul.net.
That's PastorPaul.net. The devil's not playing with you. He will not be happy until your life is destroyed at every important point. He wants to destroy your marriage. He wants to destroy your morals.
He wants to destroy your money. He wants to have you messed up in your mind, messed up in your body, messed up in your heart. And that's next time in our continuing message, taking authority over our enemies. But until then, remember. He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.
In Christ, you are destined for victory.
