Father promises provision to those who make His kingdom a priority. When you pursue heaven’s kingdom, Father becomes your Source. Father gets involved in the minute details of your life when you make His rule your primary passion.
Notice how debt is a kingdom or dominion issue. Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich have dominion over the poor, and the borrows serves the lender to whom he is joined.” The Hebrew word for borrower is “lavah,”meaning, “to entwine as ‘be joined to his wife,’” “to be joined,” “borrow,” “cause to borrow or lend.”
Therefore, debt is always a kingdom and source consideration. Your debts have joined you with those to whom you owe money or consideration.
1 Debt – identify your debts.
A debt owed implies that someone has the right or authority to demand what belongs to you. Most debt comes from borrowing someone else’s money at interest to purchase today what you have no provision to purchase. Debt makes the lender part owner and partner in your condition.
Debt means that someone else is your partner financially. So list your partners-through-debt: mortgage, car, charge cards, and loans. Put down the names of the lenders with whom you have partnerships, with whom you joined. Do not list insurance, electric bill, or phone bill even though the phones are technically a debt and you owed payments for actual usage of a service.
2 Debt – identity the spirit of this world functioning through debt.
Debt becomes an open door through which a spiritual condition promotes entitlement, ingratitude, and discontent because you fail to earn by your own work and effort through your partnership with your primary Source, the Father. He wants to give you things you are prepared to maintain, so you possess things with the understanding their value and purpose.
Debt becomes an open door when you make your source and primary passion a different ruler from God. Using debt may be a matter of good business or personal planning, or debt may be a bondage that opens the door to the operate in place of or in distraction from “seeking first the kingdom of God and His right way of doing and acting.”
Assuming that you can spend what you haven’t yet earned may be presumption; or assuming that your source of mercy and provision is someone or something other than Father may be a deep insecurity of unbelief.
Debt can be a surrender or submission of God’s promises to someone else, promising what God has promised to provide to someone who does not seek first the kingdom of God because you have made what you seek after something other than His kingdom.
The person who borrows entwines with and serves the lender.
3 Debt – identify your motivation and behavior that produces insufficiency, or the calamity and destruction of the enemy that steals from your provision and prosperity.
Giving releases proper and appropriate receiving. Work attracts wealth because it creates a debt to which you partner to receive. Giving to God and others also produces a claim upon God’s promises because it partners you with God and He entwines Himself with you.
Tithe is a debt God that opens a door to heaven so you become God’s earthly kingdom partner. This practice is kingdom covenant fulfillment. The principle of God-first is an obvious kingdom principle that Jesus affirms as part of what He is bringing to fullness, not destroying. Tithing is both Law and Prophets that Jesus brings to fullness so the principle and protocol can bring fulfillment of the purpose of the Law or Prophetic Revelation. Tithing articulated a cultural expression of the kingdom of God in Israel through Moses. Tithing is nothing less than what it was, in kingdom culture, for us than it was for them.
Giving to those who cannot give in return secretly opens the door to God’s open and obvious reward. To this Jesus says, “Do not allow the left hand to know what the right hand is doing.” This is the only place where the giving requires secrecy. Giving does not have to be secret but it can be appropriately private.
First fruits partners with God for the fullness of harvest the seed promises to provide. This teaching Apostle Clay Nash just brought last Sunday.
Sowing seed isn’t about tithe, giving to the poor, or first fruits as much as it is about all the giving opportunities God provides in His kingdom. That is, sowing seed isn’t about subtracting something from your tithe or making your tithe a seed when your tithe is already seed. The principle of sowing includes tithe because tithe is available for sowing, but the principles sowing seed isn’t discussed as a tithe function when Paul talks about how sowing produces greater harvest. Eating tithe eats God’s part. Eating seed isn’t wrong because it is yours to eat or sow. The principle operates in investment; you can’t invest tithe because it isn’t yours. Tithe is God’s entwining with you for covenant provision. Seed sowing is you investing seed in what God is doing, including apostolic and prophetic kingdom strategies. Paul discusses an apostolic kingdom strategy when talking to the Corinthians about sowing seed.
Each form of giving has an accompanying promise. Debt seeks to open doors to steal that promise, eat your provision, distract from your primary passion, and substitute for God’s rule so you operate financially with the same spirit as those who are not in the kingdom would.
