I don't see any enlargement in the Bible or even in life without having a bit of a fight, having a struggle, having to contend. You want to break through in some area this year? Want to break out of where you currently are? Want to enlarge yourself? You have to decide I'm going to put up a fight - so here's the two things I want to show you about David and I want to show just quickly how you can start to put these on in your life. You realise that if you're going to be different at the end of this year it's because you decided to make a change. Don't go praying and waiting for God to change you. He's already made the changes possible through what He did at the cross. Your role is to identify what you need to change in and do all you need to do to fulfil your part. In other words you can't just pray and wait for God to do it. That leads you under religious spirit.
So here's the two things: The moment the Philistines rose up against David and he heard it - see, notice what it says about Verse 17 - as soon as David heard it, immediately he got into a battle position. Here's the first thing about David. David had an incredible warrior spirit. He had a strength of spirit. Now here's what Jesus taught in the New Testament. He taught in Matthew, Chapter 11, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent press in and take it forcefully. That's an amazing statement to make, so what he's saying is essentially this, that in order to bring heaven to earth, in order to advance the kingdom of God, the will of God in your life, you have to be determined. You have to have strength and determination. You must decide and determine and develop the strength to continually persevere until you break through. The kingdom of heaven suffers violence. The violent press in and take it by force. Every advance I have made in my life I have had to make a determined effort that I would push in to the presence of God, that I would push in in prayer, I would begin to develop the inner strength needed to break through in that area.
Now just take one area, say for example take an area just where I was struggling some years ago just with rejection and a thing around my life that caused me to feel I was just not acceptable. I'd wrestled with that since I was very young and I realised it was affecting my life, so I realised I had to deal with it. I had to have a strategy. Now one of the first parts of the strategy is very, very simple. I learned the power of praying in tongues. See the Bible tells you when you pray in tongues your spirit is praying and when your spirit is praying it says also - 1 Corinthians 14, Verse 2 - it says that you strengthen yourself. You build up yourself, so for many of us the battles we have in our life are in the soul and in the flesh area of our life and what resists us is the flesh and demonic spirits push on us through that.
What we need is strength in our spirit to prevail and God has given us a tool, praying in tongues. So I learned to pray strongly and forcefully in tongues until I could feel my whole body energise with the life of the Holy Ghost. Now you can't just put it on. You can't just develop it overnight. You have to give yourself to prayer and so I gave myself aggressively to prayer. In fact actually what I did was I got into as well as praying in tongues, I got into singing in the spirit as well and so the early days of the church being pioneered here I spent hours every day, day after day in prayer, pushing in the spirit to grow strong in my own life. What I did was I could play a piano accordion - not very well but I played enough to be able to just flow in the spirit and worship with the music just like David did, because I saw that's what he did.