When Pastor James Levesque’s daughter, Amayah, was still in the womb, doctors told her parents she had a two-thirds chance of being deaf. “Do you want to test?” they asked. Since Levesque and his wife are pro-life, he says, they refused the test.

“I remember the day I dealt with it. I remember the middle of the night when I woke up in terror,” Levesque says on the Engaging Heaven Today podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “And I knew there was a fight, and it was tears and hours. But I warred over it … and I cut the head of this thing off in prayer. And I knew that that would not touch my family anymore. … It’s all demonic.”

After Amayah was born, Levesque says, “she passed her newborn screening, which was great. … But as she turned 1 year old, and as she got a little older, we realized that she was clearly not hearing well. So last summer … we went and had her tested.”

But Amayah did not do well on the tests, Levesque says. In fact, her hearing scores were low enough that doctors scheduled a first step to trying to restore her hearing. They wanted to put tubes in her ears and remove her adenoids. “That was like stage one,” Levesque says. “And then we had an appointment scheduled for the surgery … before all of this COVID-19 shutdown happened. And as we were driving up, we had to go to Yale. Well, I didn’t have any peace about going to Yale. And we just decided not to do it.

“I remember we were in North Carolina driving. I laid my hands on her head in the car; we prayed; my wife and I made the decision that we weren’t going to take her to the hospital, and we just cursed this thing. Well, fast-forward to lockdown. … We just knew when this thing was over, maybe we would revisit the surgery, just believing God to touch her.”

And then God did what Levesque calls an “unexpected miracle.” To hear the story of how He restored Amayah’s hearing without medical intervention, click here.

The marketplace is being revolutionized in the middle of COVID-19.

In answer to the confusion and despair, there is a response forming in the mind and heart of every spiritual professional.

We see what’s not working, where shortages and gaps are painfully apparent.

Precisely in the pain point lies the anointing for spiritual professionals, who will offer pure business models destined to open up the path forward, meeting needs and closing gaps. Marketplace people are wired to bring solutions to the market with purity, compassion and productivity that open the path for progress.

Processing in this anointing requires the convergence of our spirits, our minds and hearts with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. There is protection against greed, and there is humility, prayer and appreciation for individual stories that are part of the new path for spiritual professionals. There is room for individuals rather than exclusivity. There is generosity over grabbing. There is humility over pretense.

3 Spiritual Dynamics

We have been given the gift of a divinely timed quarantine so we can get on our faces before God to reshape the future and go to the Lord to be washed with His presence to:

1. Embrace the callings and gifts of God in our lives.
2. Confess greed and rework our financial plan with generosity.
3. Remove self-serving idols and look to God for our approval, placing Him first.

We have a divine invitation to come out of this season that has ravaged people, businesses and the global gross domestic product as the radiant holy bride of Christ in the marketplace—with solutions, goods, services, and ways to love and serve our customers well.

All eyes are on the economy; people are wondering about jobs and businesses, and the Lord longs to breathe creativity and innovation into the hearts and minds of those who are ready to hear.

3 Practical Dynamics

1. What skill, knowledge or service do I have that can help others improve and grow during this isolation, redeeming the time? Answers could include teaching your signature toolkit of skills (play the guitar, build a business, write a book) on the internet. You know more than you think you do!
2. How can I provide community and connection to people stuck at home who want to discover a new skill digitally? Zoom is all the rage. We are closer to our audience than ever through technology, our phones and computers.
3. Make a plan to love and serve your customers or clients with your best toolkit. Connect digitally and show up as the transformed bride of Christ the marketplace has not yet seen.

Creating a new normal will happen as men and women embrace their gifts, seek the Holy Spirit and reach out to serve and love their clients well.

God wants to parade the bride of Christ in the marketplace, emerging with a purified heart to love and serve clients, supply needs of our cities, tell our stories well and follow the Spirit.

Listen to Linda’s full teaching about the bride of Christ arising in the marketplace at this link.

Experts agree that a key part of leadership is adaptability, the ability to flex with the times and make key decisions at critical points. Doug Smith has experienced this during the coronavirus crisis. Right at the start of the lockdown, he had to make the difficult decision to cancel the L3 One-Day Leadership Conference, which he hosts every year. But COVID-19 has had an even more significant impact on his day-to-day ministry as director of development for the Light of Life Rescue Mission, a ministry to the homeless in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Smith tells host John Matarazzo on the Along the Way podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network, “Very early on, our leadership team met, and we put together a task force that meets daily. … We determined from day one that we’re going to do everything we can to serve the men, women and children that we need.”

But what did that look like? First, “We made sure that all of our programs would be up and running, including our long-term residential programs. Now, [the coronavirus] shifted how they were run,” Smith says. “So for instance, we have 30 women and children who live in apartments throughout the city. Well, they can’t come in with their kids and everything with the social distancing. So we actually do casework over Zoom. … And so we’ve had to adjust a lot. specifically around our meal ministry.

“We serve meals every day; we’ve had to extend all of our dinner and breakfast and lunch times to allow people to be served in actually three different feeding areas that we had set up so that people could have social distance,” he adds. “We have a tent outside the mission that we rented, that we allow men to sleep in so that they can sleep a certain distance away from each other.

“So we’ve had to make a lot of changes and adapt a lot on the fly on a daily basis. But as of this moment, we have not had a case [of COVID-19] come into the mission, and we’ve been able to continue to serve and be a blessing to everyone who comes to us,” Smith says.

To hear more about leadership in times of crisis and how God uses Smith and his ministry to serve the homeless, listen to the entire podcast here.

The first day of Iyar, the second month on the Hebrew calendar, was Thursday, April 23, at sundown. It was in this month that the Israelites began to journey into the wilderness after being released from Egypt and having passed through the Red Sea. Here, they began to see and understand that God was their healer and provider. God was trying to change their mindset from that of slaves in Egypt to children of God, positioned for His promises to them.

Exodus 16:1 reads, “Then they set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came to the Wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt.”

Then Exodus 16:2-5 says:

The whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. Now the children of Israel said to them, “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full, for you have brought us forth into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Indeed, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain amount every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not. And it shall come to pass that on the sixth day they shall prepare that which they bring in, and it will be twice as much as they gather daily.”

The Israelites tested the character and nature of God and His goodness by entering that season murmuring, complaining and disobeying God. They took more manna than they were supposed to and did not respect His Sabbath rest. Yet, even though the Israelites murmured in the desert and disobeyed Him, God still showed them His goodness and provided for them.

The same has been true for some of us. As we entered 2020, we were hit with the coronavirus pandemic, its effects on our economy, social distancing and more. All of this has been difficult to adjust to and feels a lot like slavery. Some believers have gotten discouraged and not watched their words, as they have grumbled and complained against God. But I have good news: Jesus has taken us away from slavery and positioned us for promise and hope!

Stay encouraged. Your heavenly Father loves you so much. The bitterness you have been experiencing is about to turn sweet, just as it did for the Israelites in Exodus 15, when Moses threw the wood into the bitter water at Marah and they were able to drink.

Our God provides even at our worst times. Do not worry about provision. He is not going to leave you destitute. I am reminded of God’s love for His people as I continue to read Exodus 16-18. God was trying to show the Israelites who He is, His beauty, His goodness and that He is our healer and provider. I feel His heart-pains of wanting His people to know how much He loves them and is caring for them. He knows when we go through difficulties, we can easily join forces with the enemy by doubting Him. We turn from faith to fear that God will not provide for us. We need to repent of our ways—repent of fear over the virus and what we’ve allowed into our hearts and minds.

When we repent, fear gets nailed to the cross, and we are resurrected in faith. Stay in the place of faith. It is here that you will receive the joy of the Lord and all the provision you need. We have to remember that the devil is a liar and that our Father is good and loves us. God frees us from all doubts and fears. Learn to live in that place of freedom.

A few other points I want to share with you about the month of Iyar:

1. It’s a fresh month in which God says He is the healer and our provider.
2. It’s a month of radiance and blossoms, a time to remember the new.
3. It’s a time to remember that Jesus met with His disciples for 50 days before He ascended and gave us the Holy Spirit.
4. It is a time of preparation before the Feast of Shavuot, or Pentecost, when we remember how the power of the Holy Spirit came upon those in the upper room in Acts 2, and we, His people, began to receive His power from heaven.

Praise Him! Praise is a weapon that will break strongholds in your life. It will position you and change your mindset from fear to living by faith. Turn your back on the lies and manipulations as well as fear of the virus. You cannot stay paralyzed in this season. You’ve got to begin to get yourself up, move forward, and walk in the plan and purpose of God for your life. It’s a mighty month, and we’re going to see blessings in it, but first we have to believe Him by faith.

Let me pray for you: Father, I thank You for my friend. I ask You right now to fill them with faith in the mighty name of Jesus. Raise them up so that they know and understand that even if they have questioned You in the past, You will show Your goodness to them. I thank You that You are reigning down provision on their lives. I declare that they will receive that provision, the sweet water, meat and blessings that are coming. Empower them to stand in faith against the enemy. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Find out more about my new course, Soul Transformation, by clicking here!

Have you come to the point in your life that you’ve realized you’re living with self-made limits? Are you not seeing the breakthroughs others seem to experience? If so, artist and mentor Matt Tommey has the solution.

“When I think about my own life, I think most of the frustrations that I’ve had in my life have been because of the limits that I placed on myself and on God. Even limits that are placed on other people are in what’s possible in the kingdom, what’s possible for me, in my art life, what’s possible for me in my spiritual life, my financial life, my business life, whatever it might be,” Tommey says on The Thriving Christian Artist podcast on the Charisma Podcast network. “And as I look back at that, not only my own journey but in the journey of the thousands of artists that I’ve had the great privilege of mentoring, one thing really comes to mind: The limits that you put on yourself and the limits that you put on God tend to be the fruit of woundedness and baggage and undealt-with issues in your life.”

Like most people, Tommey developed coping mechanisms around his own woundedness that he took into his marriage and then into ministry. That’s when he started to recognize that not everyone else lived with these same limitations.

“And of course the enemy lies to you,” Tommey says. “And he says, ‘Well, you know, because they’re more spiritual, or they’re not as bad of a sinner as you are, or they’ve not done the things that you’ve done before, … God is blessing them. And it really skews your view of what’s possible.” As this vicious cycle continues, Tommey says, it “puts huge limits on what you’re able to believe for and receive from the Lord and from other relationships.”

So, what’s the solution? Tommey says if you want to live a life without limits, the No. 1 thing you must do is “walk with the Holy Spirit and allow Him to begin to heal the wounded places in your heart. And you know what most of that comes from? Most of that comes from agreeing with things that you thought were true at one time, but really are what we call ungodly beliefs or lies,” he says. “They’re just things that you’ve come to believe in your life as true, but that aren’t really true according to God’s Word; they just become true for you. They become your normal, if you will.”

To learn more of Tommey’s teaching on how Holy Spirit can help you move into a life of breakthrough in your life, work and art, listen to the entire podcast here.

Allow Him to increase you to His fullness. Everything we need is provided for in Him. Rest in the Father (Ps. 37:7).

Click here to listen to Dr. Gina’s teaching on this topic. {eoa}

Gina R. Prince is an apostle of the gospel of Jesus Christ. She has a podcast show called The Keys Against the Enemy on . Connect with Gina on Instagram and Twitter @ginarprince as well as Facebook at “The Keys Against the Enemy.” Visit her website at .

“And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47b) is the first place in Scripture where the people of God are referred to as “the church,” or in the Greek, ekklesia. Many people attend church and would identify themselves as belonging to the church. Does that mean all these people have come to a saving knowledge of Christ?

Author and apologist Mike Shreve says no. He also says there is an “uncommon depth of revelation” associated with the term ekklesia. “Right from the start, I can see that the church is not a work of man alone. We may be God’s instruments to help build it, but it is a work of God. This is not just an organization; the church is an organism. It is a living body of believers worldwide that transcends denominationalism,” he explains on the Discover Your Spiritual Identity podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network.

“In fact, there are over 2 billion professing Christians in the world, and yet many of them have never been born again. Many of them have never been saved by New Covenant standards, nor do they have a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ,” Shreve says. “They believe in the historical Jesus, who was born of a virgin, who was crucified, buried, and rose again and ascended to heaven. And yet too often there is no personal relationship with Him, which is absolutely essential.”

To discover more on this topic and find out how you tell the difference between what Shreve calls “the professing church,” those who profess Christianity and what he calls “the possessing church,” who are truly saved, listen to the entire podcast here.

Before the death, burial and Resurrection of Jesus, how did men and women know God? Theologians explain this through a concept called “natural religion.”

Host Mike Shreve of the Revealing the True Light podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network explores natural religion in his most recent episode. Natural religion begins with “our instinctive desire to know and to serve the Creator that happens in the heart,” Shreve says. He shares Romans 1:20-21 (AMPC) to help explain what he means:

“For ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature and attributes, that is, His eternal power and divinity, have been made intelligible and clearly discernible in and through the things that have been made (His handiworks). So [men] are without excuse [altogether without any defense or justification], because when they knew and recognized Him as God, they did not honor and glorify Him as God or give Him thanks. But instead they became futile andgodless in their thinking [with vain imaginings, foolish reasoning, and stupid speculations] and their senseless minds were darkened.”

Why does this passage of Scripture describe people as “knowing God” when Jesus had not yet come to earth and the Holy Spirit was not yet dwelling within those who believed in Him? Shreve says natural religion explains it: “Because God has made Himself known through the things which He has done. The Creator has reflected His invisible nature, His attributes, in the creation.”

But that doesn’t mean God dwells in the creation, Shreve says. “That’s a New Age concept, that there’s an essence of divine life when everything is based on pantheism, but He does reflect His nature through different aspects of the creation, and He reflects a testimony of His tremendous power through what He has done. In fact, God’s great power is revealed by the immensity of the universe. You cannot go out under a starry sky without being filled with awe. It is estimated that there are over 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Think of that.”

To learn more about how God reveals Himself through His creation, listen to the entire episode titled “What Is ‘Natural Religion’?” here.

Most of us are familiar with the biblical story of Job. And some of us may feel like Job in these days of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine. Prophetic minister Matt Sorger says the Lord put this story, especially Job 42, on his heart recently when he was tempted to fear for the future. Verse 12a says, “The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning.”

“The Lord turned the captivity, restored all [Job’s] fortunes, and I just think this is a promise,” Sorger says on the Glory Living podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “This is a promise to each one of us today. You may be going through stuff, you may be even dealing with some fear, dealing with some anxiety, dealing with some depression, dealing with some stress, dealing with some situations in your life that you’re just like, ‘Lord, is this going to capsize my boat? Well, how is this going to affect my future? When is this going to end?’ … Now, these are very real things that people are feeling.

“While I believe in the supernatural power of God, I’ve had to work through my own process this past two weeks of really realigning my heart and choosing on a daily basis to say, ‘God, You got this; Jesus, You are in the boat with me. And just as You brought the disciples through the storm, and You calmed that storm; just as you bought Job through his trial, and restored double to him, and his latter house was greater than his former, Lord, I believe that when we come through this storm, Lord, You’re going to double everything.'”

Sorger adds, “I believe we’re going to have double gratitude for just being able to give someone a hug. We’re going to have double gratitude for being able to go to church on Sunday morning or on a special service throughout the week; we’re going to have double gratitude for just the normal things of life.”

To hear more encouragement in this episode titled Special Coronavirus Message: What Is God Saying? Part 2, listen here.

Even as He foretold His death, Jesus emphasized His desire for His followers to remain united (see John 17). So it’s not surprising that the enemy works overtime against unity in the church.

Joshua Reyes says in a recent episode of his Legacy Podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network that “The enemy can use people around you, even the people closest to you, to stir up division and discord in your family, workplace and yes, even in the ministry,” Reyes says. “Nobody’s perfect, and with so many different personalities and opinions, we’re bound to rub each other the wrong way once in a while and not see eye to eye. However, our differences can be beautiful and used to give constructive criticism.

“But when handled the wrong way, our differences can lead to spoken word curses, gossip, slander, ungodly mindsets and ultimately the destruction of unity,” Reyes adds. The key, he explains, comes in looking for what God desires. “There are some extremists who need to be corrected and toned down. But not every situation we divide ourselves over even reflects the heart of God over the true issue,” he says. The enemy focuses on things that are less important, and that destructive focus affects ours.

“We have become so divided and competitive and prideful that we’re not one functioning body but many parts, doing our own thing and refusing to work with parts who have a separate function, sometimes even within the same church. There are differences that arise that are so small and so petty, yet cause destruction because people refuse to see the bigger picture,” he says.

Titus 3:9-11 says, “But avoid foolish debates, genealogies, contentions, and arguments about the law, for they are unprofitable and useless. Reject a divisive man after a first and second admonition, knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned.”

Reyes adds, “Basically, the Scripture is saying, ‘Stop fighting over dumb things and get your act together and focus on what’s really important.'” To listen to Reyes’ entire teaching titled Divorcing the Spirit of Division, click here.