Chapter Four
Our ministry, in the beginning, consisted of people sending us a prophetic word request via e-mail, and we would prophecy to them on an MP-3 player and then send it back. It was only Russ and me back then. One of the first prophecies that I did when we first started was to a lady named Deborah L. We were sitting on a couch, and Russ would go first, which kind of triggers me. He starts, and I’m able to flow into it because he has a very pronounced gift, more than me. So, we were sitting on the couch, and I saw over his shoulder a paper that said Deborah L. As soon as I looked at her name, I heard, “call her Elizabeth.” So, Russ is prophesying her socks off on this recorder, and when he finished, He hands me the recorder, and I said, “Sister, I know that this paper right in front of me says your name is Deborah L., but the Lord tells me to call you Elizabeth. You have an authority; you have a royalty on the inside of you, and you are one of His warriors. There is a scripture that says, she comes out of the wilderness, terrible as an army with banners, and I see you in full combat gear, moving on for Jesus. You Go Girl.” God called her Elizabeth.
When I was done, Russ blessed it and sent it off. In about four hours, he came back from his office in the house and said, look at this email we just got. Deborah had written and said, “for four solid hours, I have been crying like a baby since I received my prophetic word. When I was two days old, my mother gave me up for adoption. Nobody but God and my mother, and obviously you know that she called me Elizabeth.” This stuff works if you yield yourself to the Holy Spirit. There is nothing He will withhold from you that will edify, comfort, exhort, and that’s a privilege, amen? What a good God we have.
I’d like to talk about allowing God to be Lord over our whole being and how He brought me out of insecurities that I learned growing up. In 1 Cor 6:19, Paul says, “What, know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which you have from God and you are not your own?” Are you kidding me, if I’m not my own, whose am I? I belong to the Master, the One who created me, right? In 1 Cor 6:12, Paul says, “All things are lawful unto me but not all things are expedient;” that means not all things are good for me. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
Now, I was raised with a family of six kids, and mom and dad. My dad always said that we would always have a roof over our heads, and we may not have much of anything else, but we will always have food. So, I learned as a little girl, that home and food were securities. You can always count that there would be food. So, we always ate a lot of food. We had a lot of high starch, high carb foods, lots of pasta, noodles, and beans. So, because of our diet, we were always chubby girls. My mom used to say that she would find me eating two biscuits, not one in my high chair. One biscuit in each hand eating from one then the other because I was comfortable, and my flesh liked bread and carbs. I know I felt insecure as far as my relationship with my dad. He was a military guy, and he didn’t know how to nurture us very well, but he did love us, my sisters and me. There was this gap and I didn’t quite understand the love of a father because of the insecurities in me. I had a rough go of it as a child as I remember my dad was pretty harsh.
Later in life, during my banking career, I loved peanut M&Ms, and I could just eat a handful or even two. I would eat them down because I was feeding something that wasn’t godly. I was feeding insecurities. Also, the marriage that I had at that time was quite abusive, and so I would comfort myself with food. I just thought I couldn’t control him, but I can control this. I was a muncher, and I was really harming myself. I just went for it until I learned later about this very scripture that our body is a temple of the Holy Ghost. I could be surrendered in other things, the fruits of the Spirit were working in my life, but that last fruit of self-control, I was lacking. I could hardly walk very long because I was huffing and puffing. I couldn’t take trips that involved stairs because I was just exhausted. My legs would hurt; my hip went out, then my feet started bothering me.
Then at one point in my life as I would begin to wake up from sleep (I called it that Peter Pan place between waking and sleeping), week after week and month after month, I’m not exaggerating, and year after year, the first thing that I heard was the song “I Surrender All.” God very often will drop a word, a song, or something to people trying to give them instruction or correction. I heard, “I Surrender All.” So, after a while, I caught on, and I said, “God, what is it that I need to surrender? I have given you my life. I have been preaching the gospel for years and years. He said, “It’s your appetite.” You want what you want when you want it, and it’s not the best for you to make those decisions. So, “I would like you to surrender your appetite to Me.
