The bride is making herself ready, praise God.  He’s coming for a church, a bride, that’s without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing.  He’s allowing each and every one of us to be refined and reproved, prepared, purified in this last hour.  Don’t think it strange, then, when you are experiencing different fiery trials and adversities.  It’s all part of the preparation process.  “All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.” (2 Timothy 3:12) The persecution of the church has not even begun for what’s going to be coming.  So, the Lord’s preparing us.  He said we’re not children of darkness.  We’re children of the light, so, this day will not come upon us unawares.  We’re preparing ourselves for that hour and in the process praying, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”  We’ve seen out of Thessalonians how He that now letteth will let, or He that now restrains will restrain until he be taken out of the way.  We know that’s a reference to the power of the Holy Spirit within the church of Jesus Christ.  The church, by the Holy Spirit, is that restraining power.  Until the rapture takes place and we’re out of here, the man of sin, Antichrist, cannot reveal himself, Thessalonians says.

The Spirit has just been laying on my heart, saying, “I want you to share with the folks, right now, to prepare themselves and expect the blessings of the Lord in this last hour as it pertains to financial prosperity.”  I’m like, “Lord, how does that fit into everything else that we’ve been talking about?”  Now I haven’t taught on this; I can’t remember the last time I taught on prosperity.  Probably because we’re all so prosperous, we don’t know what to do with what we have, but God has blessed us all, praise God!  Every one of us, as we’ve seen over the years, there’s not a person in this room, I would say, that’s not rich.  So, when we see the Bible talking about rich men, we’re it.  We’ve seen the admonition where the Lord had spoken and said, “I want you to beware because it’s a difficult thing, virtually impossible, for a rich man to enter into heaven.”  It said they were in great amazement when He had spoken that to them.  “Who then can be saved?”, was the question that they asked.  That’s not a question of a bunch of poor people.  Now, much of the church of Jesus were very simple, but they were not poor.  A man who, biblically, is poor—we’ve got to understand the biblical definitions of the word rich and poor.  A man who was poor, according to Scripture, was a man who was “destitute.”  You don’t know where your next meal is coming from.  That’s why the Lord gives admonition as to how to deal with poor.  It said don’t you take their cloak and not give it back to them at the end of the day because that’s all they have for a covering.  He talks about the oppression of the rich against the poor and different aspects of how poor and rich are differentiated in the Scriptures.  A rich man is a man that has more than enough.  In other words, we have sufficient for today and we know what we’re eating tomorrow.  We’re rich, praise God!  “And having food and raiment,” the Scripture says, “therewith be content.”