I have proved from scripture and personal experiences that when you are building anything for God, Satan will be bullying. As soon as Nehemiah began building the wall in Jerusalem, all hell broke loose. From ridicule to false accusation to actual threat, the adversaries threw everything at him to stop the work. Prayer was his stay all through the project. Not on the scale of Nehemiah’s, but we experience some form of bullying from our neighbours when we set out with the work of the building in our Lagos church. We followed in the trail of Nehemiah by lifting up voices in prayer. God eventually raised a “Gamaliel” among them and quelled their threat.
One other challenge was from one of the contractors. We had occasion to vary the cost of the project once. When he sent the review of the work to me, the Holy Spirit asked me to go through the items listed. It was then I discovered that he had removed an item from the new quotation. I called his attention to it, and after a long argument he re-introduced the item. Without that timely intervention of the Holy Spirit, we would have incurred a loss in excess of one million naira. There is the saying that the devil is in the details. Those details may escape our physical eyes, but God’s Spirit can help us read the fine prints. I believe that it was the Holy Spirit who was at work in Peter that helped him to rip through the lies concocted by Ananias and his wife. This is how I love to put it: He who is full of the Holy Spirit cannot be fooled!