Manna
The same principle of learning to walk in blessings rather than beg for miracles is also true in the area of finances. There are laws that God created about how provision works.
The Lord said that He would bless the work of your hands.
The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Deuteronomy 28:8
The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.
Deuteronomy 28:12
Whatever you set your hand to will be blessed, but did you know 100 multiplied by 0 equals 0? You may be living off welfare today. If you are, I’m not against you. Neither am I criticizing you. You can do whatever you want. God loves you and I’m not mad at you. But guess what? You’re praying for God’s power to be released, but you aren’t setting your hand to anything—and God can’t bless welfare.
Some people think, Well, I’m not going to go work at McDonald’s. I get more from welfare than I would from working there. The difference is that if you set your hand to something, God can multiply that. He can’t multiply welfare. The Lord isn’t going to bless you through welfare. If you need it for a brief period of time, then do what you must. Anybody could need help temporarily, but don’t live there. Don’t settle for less than God’s best. Start believing God to be a producer and a contributor. When it comes to finances, some people just refuse to work.
We Struggled
I had this mindset of not needing to work myself. When I was first called into the ministry, I had a mistaken idea that I would be sinning against God if I worked a job. The Lord had called me to preach, and I was going to do what He called me to do. My heart was right, but my head was wrong. So, my wife and I nearly starved to death!
When Jamie was eight months pregnant, we went over two weeks with zero food—I mean nothing but water. It wasn’t because I couldn’t work; I just thought I was doing the right thing by not working and by pursuing the ministry instead. Looking back, I realize now that I wasn’t cooperating with God’s laws.
Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.
1 Corinthians 9:14
I wasn’t preaching the Gospel. I was called to it, but I didn’t have a group yet. I wasn’t ministering to anybody, so I shouldn’t have expected to live of it.
Then I started preaching and holding a Bible study with five or ten people. Since I was only ministering to five or ten people, I shouldn’t have expected to full-time “live of the Gospel.” I should have been like Paul and gone out and made tents to supplement my income (Acts 18:3). But I didn’t. Because of this, Jamie and I were in financial crisis for at least five years. We struggled for about ten years and nearly died because I was too stupid to figure out that until I was a full-time minister, I couldn’t expect to live of the Gospel full-time.
Praise God for Jamie! There’s probably not another woman on the planet who would have stayed with me through the things I put her through. If she had ever criticized me and said, “Why don’t you get a job,” that would have done it! I would have probably just died right there. I felt terrible as it was, but she never criticized me. Not one time did she say anything. She just followed me and did whatever I felt like God was telling us to do.
We lived from miracle to miracle. The doorbell would ring and a sack full of food would be sitting on our front porch. Nobody was there—and there wasn’t enough time for anybody to run away. I don’t know where they went! We’d just have food show up, as well as surprise money in the mail. People would bless us by sending cash in an envelope with no return address. It would just show up.
Never Deny Them Access
We could have qualified for food stamps. Our total income during our first year of marriage was $1,253 and our rent was $100 per month. I don’t know how we survived. Our second year’s income was about $2,300. We could have received food stamps, welfare, or government assistance of some kind, but I just kept believing that there was something better than subsistence and government help. I was believing God. I wasn’t doing a very good job of it, but at least I had the goal!
One time we took $7 and a coupon into the supermarket, praying and believing God because we hadn’t eaten in a long time. We needed some food! Somehow, we came out with seven bags of groceries and ten dollars in coupons. We got home and tried to figure out how this happened, but we never did. Things were on special, and it was miraculous. It’s a miracle that we survived!
One time we were at Christ for the Nations, listening to someone minister on prosperity. I remember standing there looking at the cassette tapes of teaching and thinking, Those would change my life! But I couldn’t buy them. I glanced over at Jamie, and she had tears in her eyes. She also knew that those Bible teachings could help us, but she was painfully aware of our inability to purchase them. That’s when I made my commitment. I prayed, “God, if You ever show me anything from Your Word that will help another person, I’ll never deny them access to it because of finances.” This is why we give so much of our material away for free—millions of tapes, CDs, DVDs, and books. On our website alone, we average hundreds of thousands of free downloads per month. The Lord has enabled us to give away multiple millions of different kinds of Bible teaching materials over the last four decades. Hallelujah! Glory to His name!
After that meeting on prosperity, we ran out of gas in downtown Dallas. It was around 11 p.m. and it was cold! I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have any money, so I just laid my hands on that car and commanded it to run in Jesus’ name. It started back up, and I drove that car for a week before I got any money to put gas in it. That was a miracle!
I didn’t have enough money to put antifreeze in that same car, so the block froze and cracked. The crack could be seen, and water poured out of the block. I didn’t have the money to fix the car, so I just prayed over it. We drove that car for over a year with a cracked block. It was a miracle! There’s no explanation for it. We just experienced miracle after miracle.
“No, Sir.”
After moving to Colorado, I was driving and thinking about all of these things. I said, “God, we used to see miracles all the time. We’d have to pray every day or else we didn’t eat. But now it’s been decades since I’ve had a miracle. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to lay hands on our car and see it run without gas, since we’ve been hungry and received a miraculous provision of groceries.” As I was praying about this, I thought, What’s wrong? I used to see a miracle every day of my life!
Then the Lord spoke to me, asking, “Would you like to go back to those days?”
I answered, “No, Sir. I don’t think I would. I like it better this way.”
If something goes wrong with my car now, I go get it fixed or buy a new one. So, which is better? To be able to pray, stand, confess the Word, and—BOOM—out of the blue, somebody just gives you a brand-new car? Well, that would be a wonderful miracle, but I would rather just have enough money in the bank to go buy a car if I need one.
This is one of the differences between a blessing and a miracle. A miracle involves a suspension or a superseding of natural laws. God created these natural laws. He doesn’t suspend them or supersede them at random, because they were originally created to be good. So, if you are going to live from miracle to miracle, you’re going to be living from crisis to crisis. There has to be some desperate need in your life before God is going to grant you a miracle. Miracles aren’t easy to come by, so those who are praying for miracle after miracle are living from crisis to crisis.
I see people like this all the time. They’re in desperate situations and want me to pray, yet they’ve violated every law of God. You see, there aren’t only natural, physical laws. There are also spiritual laws, such as those in the financial realm:
On and on we could go with all of these spiritual laws. These people who come to me desperately seeking prayer aren’t doing what the Word says; they aren’t working. They’re depressed, discouraged, and bitter. They’re angry and full of unforgiveness. They’re violating every spiritual law and living in crisis all the time because they’re not cooperating with what God told them to do.
Does this describe you today? Are you violating spiritual laws? Are you living in crisis all the time? Have you been cooperating with what the Lord has told you to do? God loves you, just like He loves Jamie and me. He granted us miracles because He didn’t want us to starve to death. But do you know what? There was a systemic problem with our finances and chances are, there’s one with yours, too.
A Better Way
Are you someone who has financial problems all of the time? Do you pray and receive a miracle, but the same problem comes back again? If you cut a plant off at ground level but leave the roots intact, it will grow back again. The miracles may give you provision when you need it, but the root of your financial problem remains; it has not been dealt with. If this is the case with you, then you’re going to need another miracle next month and next year because you aren’t learning to cooperate and flow with the laws of God. Due to this, you live from crisis to crisis, needing miracle after miracle. There’s a better way—it’s living by the blessing of God. You learn what the Word of God says about how to prosper and you just put it into practice.
However, there are some natural, physical things that you need to learn and do. I’ve loved God my whole life. I became born again at age eight and sought the Lord continually. Though I lived in rebellion for a brief period of time, I had this miraculous encounter at age eighteen and have been serving God full-time ever since. From the start, even though I saw many good things happen, our ministry just kept struggling. We had debt and bill collectors were constantly on our case, telling us that they were going to shut us down. We were just in crisis mode all of the time.
Paul Milligan came into my ministry in 1996 and brought his business accountant with him. He said, “We’re here to help you.” After two days, they reported, “Something’s seriously wrong here. On the books, you’re bankrupt. You shouldn’t be able to function. We’re just going to go through and figure out what’s happening.”
One of many things Paul taught me was “just-in-time” management. He took me into a storage room and said, “You have $150,000 sitting in this room.” This was back when our ministry’s income was probably $30,000 or $40,000 a month. I asked, “Where?” He pointed out all of the books, audio sets, and other resources we had in storage. I had a study Bible that cost about $14 to produce, but I had bought 10,000 copies of it in bulk to get the price down to about $7 per unit. I thought, It’s half price. I’m doing good because I really saved a lot! Paul showed me that I had $150,000 of inventory sitting on those shelves. With “just-in-time” management, inventory is kept low. Even though you pay a higher price per unit, you keep that $150,000 in your pocket instead of having it sit on a shelf somewhere. Since he showed me that one principle back in 1996, our ministry has never been behind!
There were some physical, natural things that I didn’t know about finances that made all the difference in the world. In addition to physical laws, there are also emotional and spiritual laws that God created. He said that they are for our good. They benefit us when we learn what they are and cooperate with them.
Absolutely Supernatural!
Walking in the blessing of God requires your cooperation. You have to access it by faith. Receiving a miracle, on the other hand, is basically dependent on how desperate you are. If you don’t give up or quit and you’re still looking to God, you can have a supernatural intervention, but it’s going to be after a crisis. If you’re going to live from miracle to miracle, you’re going to live from crisis to crisis.
In contrast to a blessing, a miracle is only temporary; it’s never going to become your norm. God created natural and spiritual laws for you to live by. When you get a miracle—a temporary intervention—God’s going to eventually return everything back to the natural, spiritual laws.
This is what happens with some people when they get cancer or some other disease. In the natural, it’s a life or death situation, so they have a surge of faith, believe God, and get miraculously healed. But whatever it was that allowed the illness to come in—wrong thinking, unforgiveness, bitterness, or whatever (there are multiple things that can cause this)—isn’t dealt with. They leave the root intact and over time, the physical ailment comes back with a vengeance. So, their miracle will only be temporary. It won’t last because the root cause was never dealt with.
By far, the longest miracle recorded in the Bible is the miracle of the manna (Exodus 16). God’s people were in a crisis situation. They were in a desert, and there wasn’t any food to eat. God granted them this manna, and it was absolutely supernatural:
Man did eat angels’ food.
Psalm 78:25
It was miraculous! Through the years, certain people have tried to come up with some natural explanation for manna, like saying it was the secretion of a beetle. It wasn’t. The Israelites had to collect a certain amount of manna every day. If they collected more and tried to leave some for the next day, it bred worms and stank. But on the sixth day, just like clockwork, they could gather twice as much as normal and it wouldn’t turn rotten. This enabled them to obey God’s command to rest on the seventh day. It was supernatural—not natural! God miraculously supplied their needs. But it was temporary and lasted only during those forty years in the wilderness.
Just Enough
And the children of Israel encamped in Gilgal, and kept the passover on the fourteenth day of the month at even in the plains of Jericho. And they did eat of the old corn of the land on the morrow after the passover, unleavened cakes, and parched corn in the selfsame day. And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.
Joshua 5:10-12
There came an end to manna. You can’t get manna today. You can pray for it, saying, “Well, they got it in the Bible. Bless God, I’m going to have some!” The children of Israel were in a specific crisis situation. You aren’t in that crisis situation, so you won’t get manna. It was temporary. It’s not going to happen for you. Manna was a miracle for the time, but its time has passed away.
Here’s another difference between a blessing and a miracle: A miracle is always just enough to get you by. It’ll never be an abundance. This was certainly the case with the manna. The Israelites griped about it to Moses, saying, “Our soul loatheth this light bread” (Numbers 21:5). They got sick and tired of manna—manna for breakfast, manna for lunch, manna for dinner. Manna met a need, but it wasn’t an abundance.
Contrast this with the Promised Land. There, they had all kinds of fruit and meat available to eat. Consider the sample the spies returned with—one cluster of grapes so big that they had to put it on a pole and carry it between two men (Numbers 13:23). That’s how abundant the land was! Their cluster of grapes was huge compared to a cluster of grapes today. Perhaps the grapes were as big as apples. Can you see the abundance there?
The blessing of God comes through natural things. It grows and takes time. You have to plant a seed and then weed and water it. This takes some effort, but the blessing is much more abundant than a miracle.
Temporary
I talk to a lot of folks and see these same patterns with God’s people today. The Israelites crossing over into the Promised Land had grown up on nothing but manna. Other than Joshua and Caleb, everyone older than sixty had died in the wilderness. The vast majority of those entering into the Promised Land had been born and raised during the forty years in the desert. They had never eaten anything but manna. They lived by miracles. So, when the manna ceased, some of them were out there the next day looking for the manna. Their entire lives they had lived by miracles. They weren’t going to dig holes in the ground, plant seeds, water them, weed, and patiently wait for the harvest. They may have said, “You’re not going to make me work. I’m a faith person! I believe in supernatural miracles!” But guess what? The day of miracles for their food supply was over. It was only temporary.
God doesn’t want you to live by miracles. His plan is for you to live in the blessing. The blessing is more abundant and prevents a crisis, whereas a miracle occurs in response to a crisis. The blessing isn’t temporary; it’s eternal.
Later in this book, I’ll show you that once you access the blessings of God, you cannot reverse it, and Satan can’t stop it. Once you get into the blessing of God, it’s unstoppable and so much more abundant. The abundance of the land of Canaan was so much better than that little bit of manna. Even though the manna was supernatural and was God’s supply, it was temporary and not abundant.
God gives you miracles because He loves you so much, He’s trying to help you. But you need a miracle because you’ve been violating spiritual or natural laws. God loves you and wants to keep you alive. God gave Jamie and me miracle after miracle for years because of my own stupidity. He kept me alive. But now He’s taught me how to live in the blessing. He’s shown me how to cooperate with the laws of God, and the blessing is much more abundant. Things are much better now. I don’t want to go back to living from miracle to miracle.
Miracles should be for other people, like those who are just coming to the Lord who don’t know how to walk in the blessing yet. They receive a miracle from God because they haven’t gotten their hearts right and lives conformed to the Word yet. They aren’t walking in joy. They still have bitterness and unforgiveness. So, praise God, we need miracles for the people who don’t yet know the spiritual and natural laws and how to cooperate with them. We need miracles to take place for their sakes.
However, if you understand what I’m sharing, you ought to get to a place where you say, “God, help me to never need another miracle in my life. Father, teach me what I need to know so that I can walk in Your blessing and prevent crisis. And as I live in the abundance of Your blessing, make me a vessel through whom You can bring miracles to others who need them. Amen.”