Great Maxims

By Fabian F. Harper

Daily I remember the words spoken to me in the secret place upon which you have caused me to both hope and excel. Your gentleness and patience have established my comfort, enlarging my capacity to both taste and see that the Lord is good. There are times when I feel like flying away with you, even though the time is not yet right nor my season fulfilled. Just being with you runs so deep. The closer I walk, the deeper it gets. Yes, even deeper still as I conform to Christ in me, the hope of glory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499075540

Fabian F. Harper

Pastor Fabian Harper sense his call to ministry in the late eighties as his passion for Evangelism was explored and cultivated. After marrying his childhood sweetheart that he met in 1975, they begun living together in Brooklyn New York in the mid-eighties. As his love for souls grew he transitioned to Brooklyn Tabernacle Church where he began ministering more intensely to prisoners at Rikers Island Prison and Queens House of Detention Center. Pastor Harper served as the Director of Missions at Voices of Faith Ministries. He now Pastors at Global Empowerment Ministries under the leadership of Dr. Keith Lawrence. Pastor Harper holds A degree in Liberal Arts from The Borough of Manhattan University, A Bachelor of Arts in Forensic Psychology from John Jay University, A Master of Arts degree in Christian Counseling and a Master of Arts in Leadership from Luther Rice University.

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Chapter 1

The Purpose of Delay

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S o many times, the Lord will hold, if not delay, the passage of time to punctuate his purposes and regulate the destiny of his children. God is never late because he created time and sustains the capacity to orchestrate the flow of its rhythm. He delays time so that the deeper plans of eternity can be more evident to the sons of men that are sometimes unbroken and impeni tent.

Time is a servant to his counsel and submits to the consciousness and mystery of his will. Time is the currency of moments translated into seasons of purpose and opportunity. These opportunities are given so that grace is seen in the extension of time classified as delay.

Delays can be dangerous because it takes the edge off predictability, which is nursed by the tension of expectations. (At times it’s God disappointing your wish to fully satisfy your need.)

The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeks Him. (Lam. 3:25)

(Delay is divine timing disguised as neglect. It’s God in transit but not in transition.) It’s the move of God suspended but not displaced. Delay can mimic disregard and disapproval. It’s divine momentum that is regulated in time by the order of his divine counsel.

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. Then after that said he to his disciples, let us go into Judaea again. (John 11:5–7)

(God will delay in the natural to ripen the cause of his purpose and the intervention of his power.) It’s the maturation or fullness of time that births the miraculous. God’s delay may sometimes appear as indifference or forgetfulness, creating a sense of numbness that exhausts yet stretches us beyond human dimensions. (God’s delays provide opportunities to explore motives and examine character. Delay serves in the consolidating and maturity of time, bringing order and conformity to the seasons of men). Delay is designed to provoke, if not stimulate, interest as we pursue and progress in the Kingdom of God.

Delay can deepen trust, strengthen stability, enhance self-control, and facilitate introspection. It’s God monopolizing time according to divine possibilities.

(God will delay the urgent to accomplish the necessary.) Delay is God’s protest against the assault of hurry. Delay will undress intentions disguised and concealed through the advancement of hurry. Delay revives trust and deepens dependency in God, who ordains moments unknown to us.

Yes, he has delayed your marital intentions, your graduation, your job promotion, your plans and dreams. These delays are designed to eliminate failures and setbacks that are unseen. Delay maximizes the time, bringing maturity in areas that are silently underdeveloped and neglected.

Delay is divine appointment measured against moments unknown. Both your entrance and exit in this life comes through an appointed time, dipped in moments unknown. Seeing that your time is appointed, we must know that there is an officially fixed limit that must be utilized in fulfilling our assigned task on earth.

(Purpose, therefore, must come under the captivity of time so that the appointed season can summon the finality of your days to the glory of God.) Please be assured that both your arrival and departure date are settled, and your boarding pass is secured for all eternity.

It is appointed unto man once to die, then after death the judgment. (Heb. 9:27)

No one can control the wind or stop his own death. No soldier is release in times of war, and evil does not set free those who do evil. (Eccles. 8:8)

For man also knows not his time as fishes that are caught in an evil net, and as the birds that are taken in the snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly upon them. (Eccles. 9:12)

Chapter 2

He Is Complete and Final

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G od remains perfect, complete, and final in all his ways. The infinite majesty of his will and wisdom cannot be altered by the transient possibilities that invade the circumstances of life. His omnipotence and omniscience will never be circumvented or regulated by situational assaults. Who God is will stand, and when he begins a work in you, he will complet e it.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Phil. 1:6)

(What we know can be reversed by what God has said. What we know is incomplete until God has spoken. What we see may reflect our condition, but what God said determines our conclusion.)

We speak out of our subjectivity and factuality; God speaks from a place of completion and finality. Where we speak from has much to do with our inner resources and disposition.

We must premise our lives on the spoken word of God so that our reality will be complete and final. (Never give your situation the permission to define your conclusion or allow the instance to blur the constant in life.)

If we base our realities on subjective dimensions, we will come short of the glory of God by eclipsing the word of his power. God is not just real, but He is the sum total of all reality, both seen and unseen.

In Luke 8:54, Jairus’s daughter symbolizes what can happen to dead people in an atmosphere filled with faith and unity. The Bible said, While he yet spoke, there came one from the synagogue’s house saying to him, ‘Thy daughter is dead; trouble not the Master.’ In other words, death limits what the master can do; and because she is dead, let the master change direction and focus. If you are dead, know that your condition can be reversed by the spoken word of God. (Sometimes in life, while real help is on the way, negative information can get in the way of divine intervention.) This is why you have to keep and guard your faith in God by staying aligned with divine timing.

In an atmosphere of faith, nothing is impossible because an atmosphere of faith is a place of agreement that reveals the demonstration of God’s miraculous power.

Jairus’s community was filled with grief and dismay. They evidently knew his daughter and witnessed her dying slowly in Luke 8:42. As Christ was in transit, she died, leaving a climate of hopelessness, helplessness, sorrow, and grief.

Faith cannot be reduced when despair is induced. The works of God can inflame faith, yet deliver the unbelieving into a stupor. When Christ affirmed that Jairus’s daughter was asleep, the community laughed him to scorn. What Christ meant was that death is never permanent in the Kingdom of God, only temporary. Death only has final authority in a fallen system that’s in a state of spiritual disrepair. This is why—so often and in so many instances—what God may affirm may be in conflict with our experience and expectations. He speaks from a place of complete power that is undergirded by a final reality.

(Jairus’s community ridiculed Christ because they thought that the consensus of men could constraint the witness of heaven.) They thought what they saw, analyzed, and experienced was more complete than what Christ said. They were empowered by an experience that was factual but had no finality in the Kingdom of God. Death had terminated their hope, leaving them helpless and robbed as a family and community.

Christ realized that it was more purposeful to raise a dead child than to repair a broken and doubtful community. (Her community embraced her condition, but Christ reversed her conclusion.)

The devil may celebrate your condition, but Christ defines your conclusion. Never give your situation the permission to define your conclusion. (Resist the tendency and temptation to define the end through temporary templates.)

The prince of life will always circumvent the prince of death. The fall can never undermine or circumvent the power of the resurrection. (Death is only final for those who fell and can’t get up.)

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Believest thou this? (John 11:25–26)

Like father Abraham, we must believe God, even when it becomes absurd, unreasonable, and impossible. (We must trust him even when capacity and capability violates chance and reason.) God can be trusted because he is never incapacitated by the elements that buffet against us. Trust is the exit beyond all limits. This is the reason why Abraham staggered not at the promises of God.

But we had the sentence of death in ourselves that