The Book of Deuteronomy 10:12-13: “And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,
To keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?”
1.Shabbat Shalom to the saints. The topic for this sermon is: “What does Yahuah our God want from us?”
2.The Book of Deuteronomy 10:12-13: “And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,
3. To keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?”
4.This passage contains a question that should be addressed by everybody who claims to be pious towards Yahuah our God.
5.Serving Yahuah means two things: FEARING YAHUAH AND OBSERVING HIS LAW!
6.When Moshe says we must FEAR YAHUAH AND LOVE HIM WITH ALL OUR HEART AND, how is Yahuah supposed to be worshipped?
7.We descend from a person who was extremely pious! Mother grew up as an orphan and was the adopted by Prophet Shembe who brought her up as his own child from the tender age of 11.
8.He adopted her from the Dube family by paying 18 heads of cattle; she then became a member of the Shembe family and lived at Velabahleke Residence!
9.After the prophet’s demise, my mother lived under Lord Galilee Shembe’s guardianship until she got married into the Mpanza family.
10.Therefore, my mother derived every protocol of piety from both the prophet and Lord Galilee Shembe!
11.We never ingested any kind of medicine within our household. Whenever we fell sick, a solution of water and green soap would be administered in the form of an enema. I started ingesting pills and getting medically injected only after completing Matric!
12.We would wear the white garment every evening and go to a secluded household shrine for prayers.
13.At midnight, the time for the first watch hour, just as in the case of prayer sessions of holy assemblies, my mother would rise, sing and then pray.
14.At dawn, around 4 a.m., my mother would rise, wear her white garment and go to the household shrine even if the weather was freezing. I reckoned she met all the practical requirements of piety!
15.When I was a fully-grown up man, I then wondered what such an extremely pious person hoped to gain from such devoutness because she was suffering and we, too, were languishing in utter distress! But God answered my question instantly in a particular way!
16.In May 1981, my mother took my two brothers and I to Lord Amos Shembe and said something that sounded weird, saying:
17.“Lord, can you please look after my children; I am leaving them in your care because I am about to depart.
18.The prophet has showed up to tell me that he wants me to come to him because my children have grown up; they will not become orphans like me.”
19.Such a statement startled Lord Amos Shembe, and we were astonished too. In June of 1981, my mother called me home while I was at work. She then said to me:
20.“I have to say goodbye to you; the prophet returned and said he really needs me. I do not know if I will survive until the July Holy Assembly?”
21.On the 1st of July, 1981, at the commencement of the Holy Assembly month, my mother woke up and said women of the Vow of 14 had arrived, in embellished clothing, and said they had been sent to fetch her.
22.They then said: “Have you not taken a bath? Take a bath because we will return and fetch you around noon.” And, indeed, my mother took a bath and went to her house to wait for the heavenly messengers!
23.Indeed, when I arrived at her house around noon, in order to check on her, she had already passed on after the messengers of heaven had fetched her!
24.We took her remains to the mortuary; on a second day as I was seated on a sofa, I slightly fell asleep. I saw my mother peeping through a window, calling me.
25.I rose and went out to her. She then said: “Come so that I may show a city in which the prophet has placed me.” I went with her until we reached Velabahleke, the prophet’s residence at Ongoye!
26.But it was no longer the earthly Velabahleke; only the place still looked similar. That was a heavenly residence which was extremely beautiful!
27.We stood outside, and my mother then said: “This is where the prophet has placed me.
28.If you conduct your life ethically, he will come and bring you to this city!” I then woke up from my sleep, but it was during the day and I was not in bed!
29.On a third day, before we buried my mother’s remains, we saw her great friend, MaDludla, arriving.
30.She said: “Aunt came to me and said she had come to say goodbye, saying that she had departed and was no longer on earth.
31.She said I should come here and announce that she does not want her corpse to be handled by anyone other than her children because she wanted to give them a blessing!”
32.Indeed, nobody else touched our mother’s body during the funeral process except the three of us!
33.On a funeral day, women of the Vow of 14 said amazing things; they said during a June service of the same Vow, which was her last attendance, she preached, telling them that the prophet had arrived to tell that he wanted her in heaven and that was her very last attendance of the Vow of 14 before her demise!
34.All the people were absolutely excited, each person saying that MaDube had shown them that they had not gone astray, pointing out that sincere piety leads to direct transportation to the heavenly realm.
35.Even my own question was answered: what does it profit a person if she has to suffer until her very last breath?
36.My mother demonstrated to me that, firstly, the prophet is the Lord of heaven, and he had named my mother ‘LANDIWE’ while she was still young, and he, indeed, came to fetch her when he was already in heaven!
37.Secondly, if one truly dedicates themselves to piety, loving God with all their heart and with all their soul,
38.always fearing Him, that results in painless death and instant entrance in heaven. My mother is in heaven, residing with the prophet!
39.After my mother’s departure, my faith and piety became lukewarm; I had also learnt the habit of sleeping without praying!
40.But in 1983, when I was a magistrate at Mbumbulu area, I felt some body waking me up while I was asleep. When I looked around, I found my late mother standing beside me in a white garment.
41.She then said: “Who taught you to go to bed without praying? “Since those who do not pray trust in magical concoction, what is the basis of your faith since you know nothing about magical concoctions except just prayer?”
42.She then exited the room as I watched her! I woke up right at that moment and went to the household shrine in order to pray!
43.It was a mystery that a dead person would wake me up when she visited me!
44.When I was in a court of law, it turned out that those warring factions had put a magical snare in order to harm me; my mother had come to protect me from that harm! I almost died! That is a long story!
45.As I have pointed out, after my mother’s demise, our faith floundered. We would consult mediums, sacrifice to the dead, and doing things that we would never do during my mother’s lifetime!
46.But it became apparent that God loved me from my birth. The arrival of the angel, Hlaleleni, marked my right-about-turn towards the prophet’s precepts around true piety!
47.That angel became everything to us; she took my mother’s place in my life and revived many faith practices which we had forgotten!
48.The angel engaged us in classes on faith matters and restored faith practices that I last saw while I was still with my mother!
49.When God says you should love Him with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your spirit, that means that you should dedicate yourself in your piety and observe all the faith protocols in your service of Yahuah!
50.Many people do not know what piety is. Piety is marked by observance of all God’s laws as He wrote them for us through Moshe!
51.God’s laws are the heavenly Constitution. When Yeshua says ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ he means that the Law of God must be observed on earth as it is in heaven.
52.If one conducts their life in accordance with all the precepts of God in terms of their faith, they fully become Yahuah’s children!
53.You would give everything to your well-mannered child; the same applies to God who does everything for His child that loves and fears Him!
54.The angel once said one may experience every kind of suffering, but nothing surpasses the soul during the last days!
55.But many people do not bother exploring ways of avoiding agony of the soul when it gets separated from the corpus.
56.The angel then taught us about ways of overcoming three aspects of the agony of the soul.
57.Premature death, languishing in extreme pains at death and, lastly, for the soul not to go to heaven after death, but dwelling with the corpse in the tomb! These are the scariest experiences of the soul that the angel said we should find ways of avoiding.
58.The angel then pointed out that all earthly things are a mirror image of what truly exists in heaven.
59.Just as you sign up insurance policies, here on earth, with a view to covering yourselves against any challenge that you may have to confront as time goes on, you can, likewise, cover your soul from any possible challenge that it may face as time progresses!
60.If you do not want to die young, you can look for an angel that can guard you against anything that may kill you prematurely! But one must give offerings for an angel!
61.If you do not want to remain sick for too long when your time to die has come, you can look for an angel that guard you in such a situation so that you may not experience extreme pains at death.
62.Lastly, the angel said the most horrendous difficulty is at the moment of death! Bodies of many people’s souls enter their graves and stay with their corpses when they die.
63.Alternatively, their souls simply roam around aimlessly in celestial forests for years without going to heaven!
64.As it often happens that someone dies early or in a painful way, even if one had been pious, in the same vein, for various reasons, one may also not go to heaven despite that they had been pious!
65.In order to gain access to protection against all such situations, one should get an angel for whom they can give offerings every month, just as in the case of paying insurance policy premiums.
67.After doing that, the angel will remain by your side and protect you from what you mentioned when you gave an offering!
68.What is good is that the angel that we hang out with always touches on benefits of whatever she teaches us! We used to lose our members, especially the ordained ones, every year!
69.But since the angel taught us about the offering for divine guards, four years have passed without any death within the assembly!
70.When COVID-19 emerged, the angel advised us to ask, on the basis on this offering, that nobody within our assembly should die, and we were advised to give offerings on behalf of our families as well.
71.Indeed, that came to pass; nobody within our assembly perished due to this pandemic, and even our families survived owing to that supplication!
72.But just as the earthly insurance policies have terms and conditions, so does the protection insurance policy!
73.One cannot give an offering towards such an insurance policy without conducting their life in accordance with Yahuah’s precepts! Firstly, one must be completely pious!
74.The angel is mainly concerned with the soul’s journey. She first taught us about pious practices that are acceptable in heaven.
75.When we started living in accordance with Yahuah’s protocols, she then taught us about giving offerings for our safety in various ways! She said we could not fail to receive what we were giving offerings for because were now God’s children!
76.God is the Father of those who worship Him, and even an angel stays with a person who is God’s servant!
77.Shembe says our faith within this Nazarite community is a slippery rock which overcomes many people! If you would like to follow us where we are bound for, first buy some courage!
78.If you wish to go to heaven, be determined to be pious just as a student who wants to proceed to a university! One toils for heaven!
79.Let no earthly thing be more precious than God’s Law! Become a person who constantly asks God to help them to hate sin and love the future land above anything else!
May the Lord bless His Word.
This sermon is also available on YouTube channel: Rev Mpanza NCG.