When you go down the road, and you deliberately and wilfully violate the traffic laws, you are violating the authority of God; and He sends someone along to sort you out. [Laughs] You get a ticket, or a picture, smiley picture. [Laughter] There was always disagreement in our home over who was the one entitled to the picture. [Laughter] We would always get the picture, and then when it came, we'd put it on prominent display, so the criminal could be seen - pay the fine. So it tells us here four distinct structures, so one is government; and the Bible tells us that government has a certain role in society. It has some things it's given responsibility to do, to fulfil what God wants. As soon as it steps over that, it becomes oppressive, invasive, and we have a right then to resist. Understand that? Of course you pay the price if you do, but you still have a legal right to; and for example in the New Testament, we find that the apostles were gathered up before the religious leaders, who were also political leaders in their time.
They said: don't preach about Jesus; and they spoke with a respectful attitude: well you can decide what you wish in this matter, but Jesus has clearly commanded us to take the gospel to nations, and we will continue to preach in His name. So a clear command in the Bible given to them could not be violated by authority over them. Authority has very strict limits on what it can do. The second area is the area of the church. Now the church is an authority structure God has set up; and it's not just a bunch of people, all equal in God's eyes. Each one is of equal value, you have to understand that. We have equal value, but we have different roles; and there is authority related to the responsibilities that God has given. Also there are areas in the family. The family is an authority structure God has set up. God ordered it, God set it in place. Guess what? God's power backs it.
Whatever God set in place He stands behind it, His power; now you want to get the power of God released, you've got to find out how God ordered it, and then play your part in that order; and the power of God is released. A lot of people are striving and struggling to make things happen, because they don't understand how to align themselves with God's order, and then see and experience His power being released. So they're trying in their own effort to make something happen, instead of enjoying see the power of God flow, because they've aligned themselves, and just did what God said to do. We'll talk about what those things are. Finally, there's the authority of the individual. Every one of us has got personal authority. How do you know that? Because you have your own life you're responsible for; and therefore if you have your own life, you're responsible for, you have authority over your own life, you are directly accountable to God. You'll give account to God, not to me.
So we understand that there are four principle authority structures God has set in place. Every one has something God told it to do. It is to function in a certain way, so God's order can be developed and built in the earth. When we pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done - it happens through the structures God's set in place. God is an ordered God. You stay on the earth because He set a law of gravity in place, otherwise you'd fly off the earth. Everything in creation, natural and spiritual, is ordered. Now spiritual powers, the powers of darkness, are extremely limited in what they can do. They are limited in where they can operate. You know where they can operate? They can only operate outside the law of God, where it's dark; so their mode of operation is this: firstly they recognise authority structures, which God has set up. A couple goes and forms a new family, then the spirit world recognises: there's a new headship, there's a new unit, there's a new person in charge - the husband, the man. The Bible says it: the man is the head.
The spirit realm will try then, to get that man either to: abuse what God has given Him; or to neglect what God has given him. Every authority structure that's set up, the spirit world must recognise it; so what we do on the earth - for example if on the earth, I acknowledge Jesus Christ is Lord, a new authority structure is set up in my life, and demons must acknowledge it. So what I do on the earth can cause things to happen in the spirit world. Now we understand that many of the problems that people have, is because of ignorance of the spirit world, and how it operates; so we just go our merry way doing our merry thing thinking it's right: well that was how I was brought up, I can't see what's wrong with that - and we have no power of God released. We've got tremendous demonic infestations in marriages, and families, and personal lives.