There is a sentiment I am picking up from the Body of Christ that there is a reprieve of sorts – a window of opportunity that has opened – where before the shift comes in a big way, there is opportunity both to get your financial house in order and to prepare to seize the opportunities that lay ahead of us. Both ideas are interrelated as you cannot seize on the new opportunities if you are strapped and burdened by the past.

I heard from an intercessor in Nigeria (Yemi Issachar) who is a watcher of the global economy. This is what God has been showing him… “The recession today I believe is God’s making, to pave great ways and open serious opportunities for His children to follow a narrow path everybody ignores to become the new leaders in the new USA that God is building. This is the year of open doors and God is the one at the centre of all these shakings to propel His own to a new beginning.”

Friends, we need to take some bold steps this year to eradicate debt and position ourselves not only financially but in a host of other ways to step up into the positions of authority God has for us in the marketplace. He will not give it to us if we are unprepared, ill-equipped and unbelieving. We must rise up on the inside to accept the challenge of the Holy Spirit before us, to get trained, get positioned and take territory. Want to catch that train?

If we make a mistake by doing something that we believe is God’s will but isn’t… Will time stop? Will the earth melt? Will God have a hernia? Do you allow your children to make mistakes? Do they not learn from them? Have you not learned as much or more from your mistakes than you did from things you were correct on?

I see far too much paralysis, uncertainty, hesitancy in the body of Christ out of a genuine desire to do the Father’s will. But the heathen, unaffected by any desire to do God’s will, forge ahead and take territory — territory that God wants His footprint on… territory that God wants to expand His kingdom, His influence, His presence, His control upon.

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And I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that I, the LORD, who call you by your name, am the God of Israel.” (Isa 45:3)

Things are changing fast. Our paper dollar is sinking and gold is floating high. Real estate values turned out to not be not so real and their values are plummeting. They are predicting another 20% drop in home prices in SW Florida this year! But yet, if you have eyes to see and with a little planning, there are fortunes to be made. They are to be found hidden in the secret places. They are wrapped in darkness, even gloom.

While our current economy is tanking and the personal wealth of millions is evaporating before our eyes, there are some who saw this coming and are beginning to step into the gloom, the darkness, and see what others do not. They see opportunity and are poised to take advantage of the times.

You don’t have to have cash to take advantage of the changing times. You must have vision however. And courage. Cash helps, but vision — when it is clear — attracts an abundance of cash from those who don’t see as clearly as you. Get really clear on your vision. Begin to see what God sees and learn to communicate that. It will attract everything that is needed to get it done.

Darkness is what manifests the light. It was out of the darkness that the magi saw and followed a star that led them to the light of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ. Consider the stars… they are always in the sky but only visible when it’s dark. We need the darkness to see the promise, to see the stars, to see what’s possible. When the light returns we know the stars are still there.

We need the darkness to reveal our weakness to ourselves that we may look up to the stars, the promise, the hope that is Jesus Christ. When we have wrestled with God in the night season like Jacob of old, we may well spend the rest of our life walking with a limp, but we never again will doubt God for we have seen him. It is in that wrestling and struggling with God that He redefines for us our very nature and purpose. (See Genesis 32 for details) Jacob which means “supplanter” was named Israel which means “a prince, one who rules as God”.

I am well acquainted with the night season and have learned to gaze at the stars and see the promise of God. It seems to make the night season shorter. If you are in a night season, take advantage of this opportunity to see wonders you may never have seen before. Press into God and gaze into His wonder. Wrestle with Him, even if it breaks your leg. You will emerge in the new day with a new sense of identity and more directed purpose. That in itself is a treasure worth finding!

I feel impressed to share an excerpt with you from the one-year devotional my wife Brenda and I wrote some years ago, called Grace for Grief. There are some of you right now that know folks who are walking through the grief process who this might help. Each day we quote a Scripture passage and then a prayer to God from one who has buried two children. This is not head knowledge. It is from the heart. Here is the excerpt from Wednesday of Week 12…

Scripture Passage…

“So place yourself under God’s authority. Resist the devil, and he will run away from you. Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil with good. Be firm in the faith and resist him, knowing that other believers throughout the world are going through the same kind of suffering. If you faint in a crisis, you are weak.” (James 4:7, Romans 12:21, 1 Peter 5:9, Proverbs 24:10)

Prayer Response…
Today I feel outgunned, outnumbered and all alone. The darkness within eclipses the sunlight without. Then it comes… I remember Your word and submit my thoughts and feelings to You. I resist the tormentor of my soul by drawing close to you and take heart that this path I walk, all people must walk. I am strengthened by the knowledge that you are with me always.

Grace For Grief (Hardcover)

“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the armor of kings, to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; Remember the picture. Babylon had impregnable walls 75 feet thick, 200 feet tall with 100 gates of solid brass which were surrounded by a wide ditch of flowing water from the Euphrates. But the Babylonians had been enjoying a night of feasting and some fool left the gate open affording Cyrus the opportunity to march right in take over with barely a fight.

There is a powerful lesson here. You can have every outward sign of strength. You can go to church every time the door is open and do all manner of good works. But if you have left a gate open, you are vulnerable to attack. Consider for a moment the eye gate… What do you allow your eyes to look upon? Job made a covenant with his eyes so that his thoughts would not be upon a maiden. (Job 31:1) Do you set your eyes upon riches which certainly take flight like the eagle? (Pro 23:5) There are many things clamoring for the focus of our eye gate but to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple (Psa 27:4) surpasses them all.

Your life may be a fortress of good works and good intentions, but if you leave your gate open… if you feast upon the wrong things, you may find one day, your city, your life has been taken over by hostile forces and you were unable to put up any serious resistance. What have you been feasting on?

My dear friends… I spent 4 years studying and walking out the lessons from the Tabernacle of Moses before making them available to you.

No teaching or revelation has impacted my life more. I am asking you, indeed urging you to read this whole email, check out the offer it links you to and get yourself one of the FREE sets (yes, there is a string attached), before this offer goes out to hundreds of thousands beginning tomorrow and we run out of the FREE sets. You will thank me later… (o-:

How Pursing God Trumps the Pursuit of Riches - Every Time!
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7 Ancient Paths to Wealth, Wisdom & the Wonder of God
(THE RAINCATCHER’S SECRET)

“But God” I asked, “How am I ever going to get out of this financial hole?”

“Pursue Me”, the Lord responded simply.

“But God, I thought I had been doing that and look at the difficulty I’m in now. What do you mean, ‘Pursue Me’?”

“Pursue Me” the Lord answered again.

I was frustrated. I wanted a list of things to do. God wanted me.

“But how do I pursue You? I obviously haven’t been doing that very well. Would you please explain that?”

The Lord answered a third and final time with an authority I knew not to question further. “Pursue ME.”

With That, I Purposed to Rise Each Morning and Pursue God like Never Before
My wife and I had just returned from Guatemala where we had the best and worst experience of our life. The best because of the harvest of souls and seeing God manifest Himself mightily and the worst because we took a terrible financial beating.

I was in desperate need of answers and all God would tell me is to pursue Him. If that’s all He tells you, you best be doing it! For me, it meant abandoning my idea of twenty minutes of quiet time each day. Instead, I would read my Bible and pray - until… Until His presence showed up and until, that same presence lifted. I found out that He was always glad to meet me in the morning and never in a hurry to leave. My quiet times were never less than an hour, usually lasted for two or three hours and it was not rare for it to go four or five hours. If God showed up, I was not about to leave.

We had only $300 cash…
Our credit line was exhausted and there was no more room on our credit cards. With no work lined up, we were in desperate straits. The first thing God dealt with me on was covetousness. The sin Paul compares to idolatry. Not very pretty. I was stricken with grief and the first thing we did was take the $300 we had left and wired it to a widow and orphan we had met in Guatemala.

Within days, God had impressed upon folks to help us out with some cash and we went to Dallas where we met with Chuck Pierce for breakfast. His prophetic word for us was one of the goads we stood upon to climb out of the pit. Then an old friend called from Canada announcing that he had been praying and the Holy Spirit told him to contact me. He wanted some business counsel and asked my fee. I told him if the Holy Spirit told him to call, He could also tell him what to pay. He received my counsel and as it turns out, God was quite generous.

As I kept pursuing God, He kept revealing mysteries to me.
While I pursued Him and grew in Him, He also brought me a steady stream of unbelievable opportunities for book deals, television production, favor with national ministries, etc and a steady, growing stream of professional clients. It has been 13 years and the stream has never shut off and I’ve never had to look for another client or opportunity since. I quit trying to be the rainmaker and simply followed the cloud of God and became a professional raincatcher and it has made all the difference!

Perhaps the most profound mystery I learned during this season was from the Tabernacle of Moses. I had always seen it as a foreshadowing of God’s plan of salvation but now I learned to glean additional lessons from that sacred pattern that could be applied to business or life in general.

What I discovered liberated me from performance-driven behavior and left me seated at the feet of Jesus being taught by God through His Word how to profit (among other things) using seven powerful lessons from the Tabernacle of Moses to poll vault me further than I had ever gone in the world of business. Just one of the lessons, The Power of the Threefold Blessing revealed throughout Scripture will open your eyes to dimensions you may never have dreamed possible.

If you are tired of chasing riches…
If you want to be through only seeing them take flight like an eagle (Proverbs 23:5) and would rather chase after God and learn how to let Him add everything you need to your life, I invite you to examine closely this special teaching, The RainCatcher’s Secret - 7 Ancient Paths to Wealth, Wisdom and the Wonder of God. It can revolutionize your life. It did mine!

Also, I’m giving away these CDs to the first 500 people who order the downloadable (MP3) version. Click here to check it out.

Blessings,

Michael Q. Pink, Founder
Selling Among Wolves, LLC

P.S. One more important thing:

As a subscriber to our e-mails, I wanted you to have the first chance to see this. Next week, we’re expecting hundreds of thousands of people to see this information. So… go take a look right now! The first 500 people who order the download are the ones who will receive the CDs free!

UPDATE (11/13/2007): We are now down to only 118 sets of FREE CDs remaining!  We have another large group who will see this information later this week, so if you’ve been considering this taking me up on this offer, now is a great time to do it!  Blessings, Michael

 I don’t want to leave the topic of adversity without sharing with you a very positive perspective. I have learned that adversity and opportunity are always - not most of the time - but always, joined at the hip! No matter what the circumstance, there is always something of high value that can be gained from it. The greater the adversity, the greater the opportunity.

When you find yourself in the grip of adversity, count it all joy knowing this, that the trying of your faith works patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing. (James 1:4) The end result of adversity can be sweet fruit indeed.

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