God tells us in 2 Corinthians 6:16, “I will dwell in them and walk in them and I will be their God and they shall be my people.” You are the temple of the living God! You walk, He’s dwelling in you; you talk, He’s living in you; you experience life, He’s experiencing it through you—you are one with Him! “… he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (1 Cor. 6:17).

Fixing your eyes and your heart on Jesus will protect you from all the tricks and traps that this world and the devil try to set against you. A commitment to believe and yield to God’s Word, and His transformation process in you is a good place to begin. He is alive and working, and will lead you down the path He put in your heart, as well as get you off any path that isn’t for you!

Jesus told storms to cease, He told fish to come to the fishermen’s nets, He commanded sickness and demons to leave. In doing this, He was proclaiming by demonstration the dominion, the authority and the restoration of everything back to us in Christ!

In the Old Testament God told Moses that His name was “I AM.” God never changes, and in the New Covenant I AM now lives in us, reminding us: “I AM what you need me to be, I AM your comfort, I AM forgiving, I AM mindful of you, I AM your healer, I AM loving, I AM a deliverer, I AM a giver, I AM a friend!”

Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom, which is justice, our freedom, our redemption, our justification, our salvation and our restoration. He proclaimed it and then He spoke it when He said to the sick, be healed! Blind eyes open! Deaf ears open! He declared for all time that we don’t have to live under the authority of darkness anymore!

The attempts the devil makes to frighten and/or oppress you are, in reality, like a toothless lion pretending he has a roar. YOU ARE IN CHRIST! The Lion of Judah lives in you, and the devil can’t touch you, no matter what your situation may look like to the contrary. This New Year, prioritize the time to get the Word of God rooted and grounded inside you, letting Jesus teach you. When you do, your understanding will be renewed and changed, and the devil will flee when YOU roar!

Religious tradition teaches that God uses sickness to teach us. But if that were true, then every person seeking medical help and every doctor who treated them would be in rebellion against God for attempting to heal that afflicted one. Every hospital and medical office would be houses of rebellion. The truth is, Jesus was a revelation of God’s will as He went about HEALING all who were oppressed of the devil! (Acts 10:38)

In many areas of life you can slip back into old patterns that you had previously freed yourself from. You wake up one day and realize you are back in the rut of doing what you were stuck in 10 or 20 years ago! This can also happen in your thinking, which ends up limiting the power of God actively working in your life. It happens when you start reading the Bible more as a history book than as a living letter to you, to be applied and acted on every day. Remember, back then it was the ministry of Jesus in a Jew. BUT NOW, it’s not just history, it has become the ministry of Jesus carried out through you!

When the children of God forgot the miracle of deliverance from their past bondage in Egypt, they lost interest in the provision of daily bread as well as the shade by day and warmth by night. They turned their eyes to go back to slavery in Egypt.  We all can lose our hunger for the miracles of today and replace our rejoicing with memories of the past. Let us never look back, but plan a future in the impossible!

We are like the town criers, announcing the truth to people that they are forgiven, healed and free—it’s already been given to them by grace and they don’t have to earn it! It’s God’s justice delivered to His children in Christ!