The Blood Covenant #20: Redeemed From Poverty Into the Blessings of Deuteronomy 28

The blood covenant redeems you from something and into something: from spiritual death, the curse and poverty, into the life, blessing and prosperity of God’s kingdom. In this message the pastor shows that prosperity is far more than money, that Jesus is the last Adam and our covenant head, and that the blessings of Deuteronomy 28 come through daily surrender to the Holy Spirit rather than through our own effort. It continues the teaching from The Blood Covenant19.

Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps you can take this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was posted on May 18, 2021, as part of a long series that the pastor says the Lord prepared him for over two years and that had already run about five months. It focuses on redemption from poverty and on the first fourteen verses of Deuteronomy 28, which the church had been studying for a couple of months. It runs a little over an hour and closes with prayer for healing, an invitation to receive Christ and communion.

His starting point is simple: Israel was exempt from the plagues in Egypt and left with the wealth of the Egyptians because they had a covenant with God. Believers today need to know their covenant just as well.

Prosperity Is More Than Money

The pastor opens by naming fear as the root of much error in the church. Fear draws people away from God, while faith draws them near, and God promises to draw near to those who draw near to Him (James 4:8). Many who attack prosperity, he says, can only picture money. Prosperity is much more than that, and even money corrupts only the person whose soul is given to loving it.

We are to set our affections on things above (Colossians 3:2), yet that does not forbid good things on earth. Like any parent, God wants good things for His children. Jesus left heaven and became poor so that we might be made rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). Poverty, the pastor says, is a curse and an oppression, and also a frame of mind: a person can own a house and still have no home.

He speaks from experience. He grew up poor, and in ministry his family once lived for over a month on a donated case of instant oatmeal. They took communion every day, thanked God for what they had and never talked about being poor, and God provided. He adds a pilot’s saying: “your attitude will determine your altitude.” Nose up, you climb; nose down, you crash.

Money itself is neutral, he teaches. It is the love of money that is the root of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). He and his wife have given away everything they owned twice, and once a believer is convinced God wants him prosperous, things lose their grip, because God supplies every need according to His riches in glory (Philippians 4:19). He then shares a distinction he found in a book by a wealth psychologist:

That is why the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the righteous (Proverbs 13:22). Israel asked their neighbors for silver, gold and clothing before leaving Egypt (Exodus 12:35–36). That is prosperity, he says, and it rests on what Jesus has done, not on anything we have done.

The Last Adam and the Blood Covenant

The foundation of the message is 1 Corinthians 15:45–48. Adam, the first representative and first covenant man, became a living being. Christ, the last Adam, is a life-giving spirit. There will be no other representative of mankind after Him. He is now our King and the head of the blood covenant.

When we are born again, eternal life is not something we receive one day; it is in us immediately. The pastor calls it “the real you,” not the body and not even the soul, which can be changed. He points to Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3:3–6: no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. Being born of water, he explains, is natural birth from the womb, and the next verse confirms it: what is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.

The first covenant covered sins; the new covenant takes them away and gives us the very life of God. That is why we must live by the spirit. The mind will say we lack, the body will report pain or disease, but God’s Spirit within says He has healed and prospered us.

Colossians 1:13–14 gives both sides of redemption. God delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of His Son, in whom we have redemption through His blood. He did not leave us in limbo until heaven. “It’s the sweet here and now,” the pastor says, because Jesus came that we might have life more abundantly (John 10:10).

Learning to Surrender Every Day

Here the pastor names the problem. Israel was redeemed from Egypt, but while enslaved they had learned to resist their oppressor in their own subtle ways. He tells of little Johnny, ordered to sit down in church, who sits with arms crossed and says that on the inside he is still standing up. That is the way of the world: we learn to fight in our own strength and grow more confident in it than in God’s.

Salvation began with surrender, when we admitted we could not live our lives without a Savior. But continual surrender must be taught and practised. He warns against will worship, the attitude of “look what I did,” because no one came to God unless He called them. Jesus said we did not choose Him; He chose us to bear fruit (John 15:16).

He shares that his brother-in-law, in his seventies, was scheduled for a triple bypass after doctors found three arterial blockages. The pastor prayed with him by phone the day before. The next day the man called back on his way home: the scope showed no blockages, and he called it a miracle. That confidence in God, the pastor says, comes from standing on what God promised.

The world’s way looks like the Valdez oil spill story he recounts. After costly rescue efforts, two oil-soaked sea lions were released before cheering crowds, and moments later killer whales took them. We may think we are free, but Satan comes only to steal, kill and destroy. Christ does not just wash us off; He makes us a new creation.

So when thoughts tell us God would not do what He promised, we cast down those imaginations and bring every thought captive to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). We stand fast in the liberty Christ gave (Galatians 5:1), and if we are led by the Spirit we are not under the law (Galatians 5:18).

Hebrews 4:11 urges us to strive diligently to enter God’s rest. Israel could have reached the Promised Land in about a week, yet wandered forty years because they would not surrender. Our labor, the pastor says, is the fight of faith: to enter His rest and trust Him to come through.

Abide in the Word and Be Free

In John 8:31–32 Jesus spoke to those who already believed Him: if you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed, “and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Believing was not the end; continuing in His word was the key to true liberty, not the false freedom of the sea lions.

The pastor applies this to the church’s Christian school. Some parents want it as a safe alternative for reading, writing and arithmetic. “We’re no alternative, we’re the real deal,” he says. The school exists to disciple children to surrender to the Lord and live by the Spirit day by day. Just so, some men come to church wanting a trustworthy Christian wife without wanting Jesus for themselves.

The blessing of God does not come because of some great thing we have done. In his weakest moment, he says, he can be as blessed as in his strongest, because Jesus bore our sin and now bears our life. He has done a thousand things that might have convinced God not to love him, and could not make God quit. With David he prays that God is good and does good (Psalm 119:68).

He tells of a scientist who boasts he can create life like God, scoops up some sand, and hears God say: get your own sand. We are nothing without Him, and we need the Holy Spirit more than our own breath. 1 Corinthians 2:9–12 says eye has not seen what God has prepared, but He reveals it by His Spirit. Darkness cannot overcome the light (John 1:5), and those led by the Spirit are sons of God (Romans 8:14).

Redeemed From the Curse, Free From Condemnation

Once, in a restaurant in Orlando, a man asked whether he was one of those prosperity preachers. “I’m sure not a poverty preacher,” he answered, and asked whether the man was one. His wife laughed and the debate ended. His reason is Galatians 3:13–14: Christ has redeemed us from all of the curse of the law, so that the blessing of Abraham comes on us and we receive the promised Spirit through faith.

A person bound by the law focuses on sin, failures and shortcomings. True surrender breaks that. When he gave his life to Jesus, he recalls, the congregation saw three demons leave. He had first given his life to the Lord at eleven, but ran from the call to preach because his own pastor was an alcoholic and gave him no example. When he finally surrendered, he found incredible freedom.

Romans 8:1–4 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law (1 Corinthians 15:56). Our good deeds do not earn the blessing, and our bad deeds do not cancel it. Jesus is our covenant head, and in Him every promise of God is ours.

Some claim 3 John 2 was only for its first reader, but no prophecy is of private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20). The pastor recalls his family living in a broken-down motor home behind a barn, then a trailer, then believing for a four-bedroom house for their four children. Some church members said a pastor should not live like a king and left. That poverty mentality, he warns, will kill you. Instead, rejoice when others are blessed (Romans 12:15).

The Blessings of Deuteronomy 28

Deuteronomy 28:1–14 lists the blessings, and verses 15–68 the curses, among them spiritual death, poverty and sickness. Poverty takes many forms: lost crops, too little money, confusion, losing a spouse or a home, and cruel rulers with no mercy for the young or the elderly. Deuteronomy 29:9 says to keep the words of this covenant so that you may prosper in all you do.

Reading from the Amplified Bible, the pastor walks through the blessings. Those who heed the Lord are set high above the nations, not to look down on anyone, because God does the elevating. All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you. You are blessed in the city and in the country, blessed in the fruit of your body, your ground and your livestock.

A farmer in the church, John, stands on this verse, and during the sermon he confirms that a cow of his that died stuck in the mud was raised after prayer. Your basket and kneading trough are blessed: your shopping and the preparation of your meals. You are blessed coming in and going out. Enemies come one way and flee seven ways, which reminds him of Scooby-Doo bolting in every direction.

God commands the blessing on your storehouse, wherever you store up for the future, and on all you undertake. Even with talk of recession, a believer in covenant need not fear. Nor must you search the world for a better place. In hard early years in the town, with threats against his family and vandalism, he turned down offers to pastor elsewhere, including a church in Pennsylvania with a new house and many times his salary.

When his wife Pam began packing, he told her that if she could say they had fulfilled everything God told them to do there, he would go. She started unpacking. God prepares a table in the presence of enemies (Psalm 23:5–6). The passage ends with surplus prosperity, rain in season, lending and not borrowing, and being “the head and not the tail,” if we do not turn aside from His words.

Living the Blood Covenant This Week

The pastor closes with a word he felt the Spirit gave: the one that hurts you can never heal you. Only Jesus, the healing balm of Gilead, can. Speak out of healing, not out of a wound. Even when father and mother forsake us, the Lord takes us in (Psalm 27:10).

• Surrender again today. Bring each thought that contradicts God’s promise captive to Christ instead of fighting in your own strength.
• Continue in the Word. Abiding in what Jesus said is what makes the truth set you free.
• Forgive and receive healing. Ask God’s forgiveness, forgive others, and forgive yourself for looking to people for what only God supplies.
• Celebrate other people’s blessings. Rejoicing when others prosper breaks a poverty mentality.
• Give freely. Money is neutral; use it for what God needs and trust Him to supply.
• Remember Him at the table. At communion, remember Jesus, not your failures (1 Corinthians 11:23–26).

He leads the church in Psalm 35:27: let the Lord be magnified, who has pleasure in the prosperity of His servant. Through the knowledge of Jesus, God gives us all things (2 Peter 1:2–3).

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Fear, heresy and the meaning of prosperity
• 1:04 Jesus became poor so we could be rich
• 2:14 A month of oatmeal and daily communion
• 3:13 Your attitude determines your altitude
• 6:31 Rich versus wealthy
• 10:24 The wealth of the wicked laid up for the righteous
• 11:21 The first Adam and the last Adam
• 14:22 Redeemed from and redeemed to: Colossians 1
• 16:32 Little Johnny standing up on the inside
• 18:41 Continual surrender and a healed heart
• 20:50 The Valdez sea lions
• 25:20 Entering God’s rest: Hebrews 4:11
• 26:36 Abide in My word: John 8:31–32
• 30:57 Blessed in weakness: God is good and does good
• 33:18 Revealed by the Spirit: 1 Corinthians 2
• 36:26 Not a poverty preacher: Galatians 3:13–14
• 38:36 The freedom of total surrender
• 40:01 No condemnation: Romans 8:1–4
• 43:27 From a motor home to a four-bedroom house
• 45:43 Blessings and curses of Deuteronomy 28
• 49:10 Blessed in the city and in the field
• 54:10 Blessed in your storehouse
• 59:22 The head and not the tail
• 1:01:15 Healing prayer, salvation and communion

Blood Covenant Series

This message is part of a long teaching series at NTC Ministries. Start from the beginning or continue where this one leaves off:

• First message: The Blood Covenant
• Previous: The Blood Covenant #19
• You are here: The Blood Covenant #20: Redeemed From Poverty Into the Blessings of Deuteronomy 28
• Next: The Blood Covenant #21: Surrender, Abraham’s Test and the Blessing of Abraham

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it wrong for a Christian to have money?

Not according to this message. The pastor teaches that money is neutral and depends on whose hand it is in. Scripture warns against the love of money, not money itself, and people who say otherwise misquote the Bible. The test is what you do with it. He contrasts a rich person who shows off with a wealthy person who blesses others and provides for future generations, and he notes that he has given away everything he owned twice.

What did the pastor mean by a poverty mentality?

He describes it as a frame of mind more than a bank balance. It shows up as criticism of anyone God blesses, resentment toward others’ success, and the belief that God does not want His children provided for. Some people left his church because his family bought a modest four-bedroom house. His remedy is to rejoice whenever someone else is blessed and to believe God’s covenant promises apply to you.

How should we take communion according to this message?

The pastor says God does not want us to remember our past, failures, shortcomings or frailties at the table. He wants us to remember Jesus, the covenant head who lived perfectly so that God’s blessings could come on our lives. He also connects communion to healing of hurts, asking listeners to forgive, receive forgiveness and let God heal relationships before they partake.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Deuteronomy 28:1–14 — the blessings of the covenant
• 1 Corinthians 15:45–48 — the first and last Adam
• Colossians 1:13–14 — delivered and translated
• John 8:31–32 — the truth shall make you free
• Galatians 3:13–14 — redeemed from the curse
• Romans 8:1–4 — no condemnation
• 2 Corinthians 8:9 — He became poor that we might be rich
• Psalm 35:27 — God’s pleasure in our prosperity

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

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