The Power Of Apostolic Meetings by Apostle Arome Osayi: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Gift of Righteousness and the Life of Prayer

When someone gives his life to Christ, the first major responsibility that new believer must be exposed to is a life of prayer. The believer must be taught that we have been condemned to prayer. The power God has made available to us exists so that we can labor in his presence to secure the moving of his hands.

God knows we cannot serve him without a gift, so he made available an economy of gifts that he dispenses to the believer in order to make him capable of doing things he is not naturally endowed to do. One of these gifts is called righteousness.

With righteousness, we have the audacity, the boldness to come before God without condemnation and without inferiority. What the platform of righteousness creates for the believer is a ground to commune with God. There is a word called justification — a legal declaration of discharged and acquitted. Righteousness declares your state as without accusation, the accusation Satan brings before the court of heaven. Being declared righteous is the state that affords us the opportunity to commune. That is how we benefit maximally from the gift.

Why We Meet: Apostolic Meetings

The next important thing every believer must understand in the apostolic culture is what we call apostolic meetings. This brand is deliberate.

A stadium in the city can gather seven thousand people for a soccer match, and the place will be full. But the reason they were gathered was not Jesus, so as powerful as that number was, it was not strong enough to bring Jesus down. That is why the qualification "apostolic" had to be added to "meetings" — to identify the ingredients that make a meeting apostolic.

Attending apostolic meetings is one of the avenues by which a believer receives rations of spiritual deposits that keep that believer on the path of spiritual progress, on the path of destiny fulfillment, on the path of the actualization of God's assignment. It is a provision for strength, a strategy to purify and renew your strength, your capacity, your vision.

There is a common sight in many cities: individuals who were deeply into church life suddenly decide never to participate in church life again, often because of one level of discouragement or the other. If a believer can leave church because a pastor manifested below expectation, that person never had an encounter with God — it was the pastor they loved, not God. It is like coming to church and singing because instruments are playing; if there are no instruments, you cannot sing. It is not God you love — it is the music you love.

Hebrews 10:22

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. A true heart cannot carry bitterness — the weight of bitterness influences your interaction, and your vessel becomes grounded, giving wrong readings. There are two things you cannot do without when interacting with the God of the Bible: the virtue of sincerity, and faith.

The Heart, the Conscience, and Fellowship

Your heart is not your spirit and not your soul — it is an intersection between your spirit and your soul. The conscience and intuition belong to the spirit; the mind, the will, and the emotion belong to the soul. All the components of the soul plus the conscience of the spirit form the heart.

• Conscience — the feedback zone of the spirit. If the Holy Ghost is rebuking you in your conscience about a habit or a place, that is a signal to stop.
• Intuition — part of the spirit.
• Fellowship — part of the spirit; the consciousness that comes into your inner man on account of the intercourse of your spirit with the Holy Ghost, much like a SIM card that links a phone to a network and brings a whole world of possibility into the field of an ordinary device. If you know how to manage that signal, it will bring you into realities no human being can live by natural capacity alone.

Hebrews 10:22-25

The scripture says we should have our hearts purged from an evil conscience, and also that we should love the Lord with all our heart — proving the heart contains emotion as well as conscience. As long as your conscience is disturbed, you cannot enter the place where fellowship resides, and as long as you are anxious you cannot exercise faith, because anxiety makes you hasty. Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching — we must become more devoted to apostolic meetings as we draw closer to the coming of the Lord.

It is worthy of note that scripture already reveals it is in the manner of some to dissociate from apostolic meetings because of some failure they witnessed. That excuse is scripted; it was prophesied. Genuine distance can be a legitimate reason for absence, and God can send allocations to a person kept away by real distance — but choosing to stay home and watch online when a meeting is fifteen minutes away is circumventing a policy direction God gave his people. Don't let convenience and technology erode a longstanding apostolic culture.

Why Meetings Matter — Trapped Dimensions

1 John 1:1-3

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the word of life — that we declare unto you, that you may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. John was speaking of a personality that existed before heaven itself, a personality never created, and because he was never created he cannot die — he has more authority than death.

Apostolic meetings are divine strategies by which we can trap the dimension of Christ and of the Father and make it available to interact with. There are dimensions of God that are trapped in our worship, built by our praises and our faith, and we trap it long enough for every spirit seeking to interact with those realities. As we go closer to the end of the age, we must become more serious about apostolic meetings — not dead meetings, but meetings where we encounter the dimensions of the Father and of Christ.

Matthew 18:18-20

Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything they shall ask, it shall be done for them by my Father which is in heaven, for where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Jesus revealed two spiritual laws but only explained the mechanics of the second, the one that becomes efficacious specifically on the corporate level — where two or three are gathered under his authority.

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Gathering in his name means gathering in representative capacity, doing exactly what he wants done rather than what we want. If a church gathering feels dry, the only reason is that the dimensions of heaven did not visit — because something contrary to what heaven intends was being done. When believers do what God would do if he were physically present — saying what he would say, singing what he wants sung — then he comes. That is what makes an apostolic meeting different from a gathering on a soccer pitch: immortal dimensions attend the meeting and are trapped in it.

Deuteronomy 33 — Let Reuben Live

Deuteronomy 33:4-6

Moses commanded a law, the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob, and he was king in Jeshurun when the heads of the people and the tribes of Israel were gathered together. There is an adjective of time in that verse — Moses was not king every day. Moses entered the kingly anointing of Israel only when the heads of the tribes and the people were gathered together; when the gathering dispersed, that anointing lifted.

When Moses touched the kingly dimension, part of the authority of a king is to make decrees that become law. His first decree: "Let Reuben live and not die, and let his men not be few." Reuben had defiled his father's bed, and because of that violation his father's curse took hold, diminishing his numbers over the years even though he held the birthright of the firstborn. But when Moses touched the kingly anointing — an authority superior to his father's, who was a patriarch but not a king — he looked at Reuben and reversed what a father's curse had set in motion. Moses did not operate like that every day; it was available only because the assembly was gathered and the dimensions of heaven came down.

Testimonies of What Is Trapped in Gathering

• A woman traveled in from the United Kingdom during a season of fasting and prayer, weighed down by challenges. A kingly dimension came in the gathering the next day, and a yoke broke that night — so completely that she forgot how much her flight from London had cost her, because something greater than the transport fare had happened to her.
• Strength that could not be found in personal devotion at home was found the moment the assembly gathered — praying in tongues alone for hours produced nothing, but the moment the general assembly convened, the climate changed and a dimension opened.
• A twelve-year-old boy whose leg had been permanently injured after a fall from a palm tree, who used crutches skillfully after years of practice, was told by the Lord during a service, "Tell the ushers to take those crutches away." As the word was spoken with authority, the boy began to walk — not limping, walking — to the astonishment of the woman who brought him.
• At the dedication of a newly acquired building, the heavens opened during the ribbon-cutting. A vision of a man pointing to someone's ear indicated a person deaf in one ear. The man came forward, was prayed for one ear at a time, and began to hear.