Honoring Jesus as God Does

Part of a Sermon by Pastor John, February 18, 2012

It is an understatement just to say that God has highly exalted His Son.  God has glorified him above the heavens and given him a name above every name!  God has exalted His Son so much that if His Son has baptized you with the life of God, then that’s all the baptism God ever wants you to have, because that is the only baptism that honors His Son.  To honor the Son as God does is to feel that the Son’s kind of circumcision, the invisible circumcision, the circumcision of the heart by the Spirit is so wonderful that you don’t want any other kind of circumcision.    To honor the Son the way God does means that you think that the Son’s kind of communion, fellowship with God, is so wonderful that you don’t want any other kind of communion. To honor the Son the way God does means that you think that the Son’s baptism of your spirit by the holy Ghost is so wonderful that you don’t want any other kind of baptism.  To honor the Son as God does is to know that you do not need a ceremonial “outward expression of an inward experience”, for you become the outward expression of that inner work of God.  When we esteem the Son’s spiritual garments of praise to be so good and holy that we do not need choir robes, we are honoring the Son as God honors him.

Oh, to honor Jesus in a way that pleases the Father!  That is the value of the truth.  The truth enlightens us as to how to honor Jesus as the Father has honored him, the way those without the Spirit cannot do, the way that no Christian ceremony has ever done!  God has visited us and anointed our eyes to see how foolish and vain religious ceremonies are.  At the same time, He has given us great compassion for those who practice them.  When God anoints you to see that water baptism is nothing, with that anointing comes the power to love the people who carry out that ritual the way He loves them.  You cannot love people the way God loves them until you see them the way He sees them.  How vain their efforts to serve Him in the flesh are!  But when you see it, the truth begins to hurt your heart for people the way it hurts the heart of God.

I remember, years ago, when God began to reveal the truth to Brother Jim Gregory, when the eye salve was still wet on his eyes, he began to feel a pain that he had never felt before.  He talked to me about it one evening, and I told him, “Brother Jim, that is ‘the burden of the Lord’.  You’re beginning to feel the way God feels for people.”  Only the knowledge of the truth brings that kind of compassion into the heart.

We were up in Montreal not long ago, visiting a shrine, the largest shrine to St. Joseph in the world, I believe.  It was a huge complex, very impressive.  You had to go up three or four long escalators to get to the sanctuary.  And in the prayer room, they had maybe a thousand little red candles on this side – for five-dollar prayers.  If you couldn’t afford that, they had a thousand or so smaller candles for one-dollar prayers.  Oh, to watch a young mother there, kneeling before that big image of Joseph, lighting a candle, with her child, praying about something; hurting about something!  How that grieved my spirit.  That poor mother was longing for something from Jesus and thinking that’s what she had to do in order to receive it.  She could have stayed home and touched his heart, but she didn’t know it.  She didn’t know Jesus is that good, or that accessible.

Oh, God, what has religious ceremony done to people’s hearts and minds!  I watched her climb up those stairs and reach up into the place where she could get some “holy” water, put it on her forehead, and then light a candle.  And there were others there doing the same thing.

Do we have the faith to leave off ceremony and trust in Jesus as if he really is the only way to eternal life?  We are saved by grace through faith in him!  And not through Joseph, Mary, or any other dead saint.  “There is one mediator between God and men – the man, Christ Jesus.”  And Jesus our Mediator sent us the holy Ghost to take his place.  The pope is not the vicar of Christ; the holy Ghost is the vicar of Christ, and it makes you a vicar of Christ.  Paul said, “We beseech you, in Christ’s stead.”  Paul was a vicar of Christ.  Did not Jesus say, “You’re the light of the world”?

Then, may God help us to shine, and not to charge people five dollars, one dollar – any dollar – to minister to them, but to give them a dollar if they need one.  Just through a life of holiness and faith, we can do our part in this world.  That is being a light in a dark place.  Rejoice in what Jesus has made you!  Be thankful!  You will be undervalued by everybody whose eyes have not been anointed yet, but you are precious to God!  Oh, God!  Save us from the influence of this foolish world, and let us finish our work and do our part.

Staying Excited

Part of a Sermon by Pastor John, February 18, 2012

One of the amazing things about Preacher Clark, the man of God that some of us grew up under, is that he always seemed to realize how valuable he was.  He had a flock of about fifteen or twenty people, and he thought his ministry was the greatest thing on earth.  He never lost sight of the value, the beauty, the holiness of life in the Spirit, and he never lost his joy and excitement about what was coming.  Never.  Anything from God is exciting, and he really had something from God.

May God save us from losing our excitement about what is truly of Him.  May we always be like Preacher Clark and live in excitement for what God can do with us, and for us.  Those who walk in the Spirit know in their hearts that the truth of the gospel of God is constantly molding us so that what comes out of our mouth is from Him and what we do with these bodies is of Him.  That kind of life has an effect; it has an effect on people that we don’t even think about.  Wherever Spirit-filled children of God go, into restaurants, or ball games, or wherever, people feel something good from them.  If we will walk in the Spirit of God, even our children will impress people with a feeling of goodness.  Some of us have had airline stewardesses come up to us and say, “Are they your children?  They are so good!  They’re different.”  That’s valuable, my friends.  It is a good testimony.  And we humbly thank Jesus for it!

“Working You”

Part of a Sermon by Pastor John, February 18, 2012

I got an email from Brother Ron today.  He was excited about Bob and Ellen visiting down there with him.  He’d been telling some of his friends about his visit with us, and they said, “Boy, they’re really working you hard.”  Do you know why they said that?  Because if they were visiting somebody, they would be working them hard.  They would be working them hard to get more members, to get more money, to get more status, to increase the congregation’s status in the community.  I wrote him back and I said, “Working you hard to get you to . . . what?”  He offered to start paying his tithes and offerings the last time I was there, and I said, “No, not yet.  I want you to make sure you know what you are getting into when you get involved in my work.”  So, it’s not money.  As far as I know, there’s nothing for Ron to do here but enjoy it.  His friends obviously do not understand fellowship!

There’s not a single one of Ron’s friends that would fly to Australia to visit a man and his wife because God had opened their minds, as some of us did with Brother Damien and his family, or pay for them twice to fly to the US from over there.  Not a single one of them would do that because that is not how you “work people hard”.  Oh, we worked you hard, didn’t we, Damien?  It is so sad that Christians don’t understand that depth of love and joy for others, and here we are, living in it!  Thanks be to God, we live in it!  And we live in that love and joy and  fellowship, and excitement of seeing God opening up a heart and mind because we rejoice in the truth.  That’s our joy!  That’s our purpose.  I flew to Australia with Gary, Song and Barbara because Damien was me over there.  We had been made one in Christ, and I wanted to go visit me!  Christianity doesn’t have that kind of fellowship.  It doesn’t exist anywhere except in the sweet light of God.

Live The Way You Want To

Part of a Sermon by Pastor John, February 18, 2012

If you people here are not living the way you want to, please leave!  Go somewhere and live the way you really want to live.  If you are not living the way you want to, you obviously need to change something.  If you want to do the will of God and you are not living that way, you need to repent of something and be filled with the Spirit.  If you want to live like the world but you are too ashamed to do it here, you need to repent of wanting to live that way – or leave and go do it!  I believe and preach a gospel that liberates people to live the way they want to!

Many years ago, on a Sunday morning before we left to go to our afternoon prayer meeting down at Grandma’s house, I was listening to a local minister on the radio.  He was talking to his congregation, warning them against living the way they want to.  “You can’t live the way you want to!” he demanded.  “You need to live the way the Bible says!”  And I thought, Those poor people who want to live in sin!  And their pastor isn’t helping them!  If that minister had been of God, he would have told those people that Jesus delivers from sinful desires and replaces those unclean desires with holy desires!  Then they could live the way they wanted to, and it be good!  Instead, he berated them for wanting to sin, and gave them no way out.  People cannot help wanting what they want, and if they are languishing in a life of evil desires, they need to be set free, not condemned for it.

My message is, and always has been, “Be filled with the Spirit and then live the way you want to!”  Are you living the way you want to?  There is no other way to be happy, in Jesus or otherwise, than to live the way you really want to live.  The person to whom God has given the holy Ghost and in whom He has created right desires, can live the way he wants to live, and it will please God!  But if you do not want to live right, then your options are either to seek God for deliverance or leave this congregation and stop tormenting yourself with a pointless act.  Seek God for a desire to live right, or go live the way you really want to!

Thank God, I’m living the way I want to!  I drink all the liquor I want to drink.  I go to Las Vegas and gamble every time I want to.   I commit adultery with all the women I want to.  I tell all the lies I want to tell.  I live the way I want to!  And I praise God the way I want to.  And I love others all I want to.  And I tell all the truth I want to tell.  Jesus came to create holy desires in our hearts and then to give us the power to live the way we want to!  In Christ, we are not doomed to force ourselves to live contrary to what we want; on the contrary, we are liberated to really be ourselves!

Brother Earl Pittman once testified – and it’s a true testimony of all of God’s people – that a long time ago, he wanted to live without sin and he just could not do it.  So, he kept repenting and seeking God until he could do it, until the power of God came in so that he could live the way he wanted to!  That’s my testimony, too.  As a young man, I wanted to truly understand the things of God.  I wanted my words to reflect His wisdom, not my opinions.  That’s what I wanted from my heart, and I sought Him from my heart, and He taught me from His heart so that my words would reflect His heart.  That is the kind of thing Jesus came to do for us, and he did it!  So now, just how do you want to live?  If you want to live a right life, tell Jesus!  He’ll accommodate you.  He’ll make room for you at the table and let you live exactly the way you want to.

Some years ago now, Brother Bob was alone in his peach orchard one day, and he wanted to live right but didn’t know how.  He prayed, “God, there’s got to be more to life than this.”  God made room at the table.  Shortly after Bob prayed that sincere prayer, God sent a sister in the Lord to invite Bob to the supper.  The same thing happened out in San Francisco with Brother Gary, wanting to know the truth.  “God, there’s got to be something better than this.”  And God invited him to the table with a gospel tract that he received in the mail.  Praise God!  Every one of the people in this congregation have had similar feelings at some point in their lives: “God, where is the truth?  Who is right?  I want to live right; I want people in my life that I can trust, people that I can love and they’ll love me back and not do me wrong.”  And over time, God has created this congregation to meet that need, to answer those prayers.  Here we are.  And it has nothing to do with me manipulating you, or you manipulating me; all of that kind of stuff is in the world, not in our heavenly Father’s kingdom.  We do not manipulate each other, we relieve one another; we edify one another; we build up one another; we help one another; we love one another.

Every creature in heaven – the cherubim, the seraphim, the archangels, the angels, the Father and the Son – all of them are just doing what they want to do.  For them, living a life of holiness and goodness is just as natural as can be.  They do not have a “live holy and good program” to go by.  They just do what they want to do, and it is holy and good.  And if the Son of God has made you free, you, too, are doing what you want to do.  Holiness is easy when Jesus creates a desire for it in your heart.  That’s what John meant when he said, “His commandments are not burdensome.”   God’s commandments were not burdensome for John because he wanted to keep them.  Every commandment of God opens up a door so you can live more like you want to, if you want to keep God’s commandments.  But let me tell you, God’s commandments are very burdensome if you do not want to keep them.  If you do not want to know the truth, the truth is a burden, the truth will seem like an attack to those who do not want it.  To them, the truth is bad and is cast aside as irrelevant.  But if you do want it, the truth tastes sweet.  It is a relief.  Oh, what a refreshing it is!  When Jesus said, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” this is what he was talking about.  He was promising to re-create us so that we can live the way we want to, and it be good!

God has given us holy desires, and then given us the power to live the way we want to!    That’s really living.  When we are living from our heart, we are living the way we want to.  And when we live the holy life we want to live, there are no regrets.

You Are Not Irrelevant, Part 2

the test of being ignored

Part of a Sermon by Pastor John, February 18, 2012

If you do not have the Spirit, you don’t have any hope.  It does not matter in the least how many ministers pat you on the head, tell you that you are saved, or say that you are one of the best members.  Member of what?  You’re not a member of the body of Christ without the holy Ghost.  And every religious organization that is in the world is trying to make that message seem irrelevant to what’s really happening in your life.

What’s really happening is that everybody who repents really receives the holy Ghost!  But neither men nor Satan want that message to be heard.  That is why they devised their religious organizations – as an alternative to the truth.  What’s really happening is that people are not repenting, and that is why they are not receiving the holy Ghost and being born again!  That’s what’s really happening, and that’s not irrelevant – unless you trust what one of man’s religious institutions tells you.  Everybody needs to know that Paul once said, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.”  And that does not mean that a person has the Spirit of Christ just because some minister told him that he had it.  God alone tells you when you receive His Spirit.  His Spirit bears witness that it has come into your heart because the Spirit is truth!  Paul said, “because you are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ ”  That’s not irrelevant.

You mean if I haven’t spoken in tongues I’m not born again?  Yes!  If the holy Ghost hasn’t declared you to be a child of God, who else has authority to tell you that?  I don’t.  The Bible doesn’t.  Angels don’t.  Christian ministers don’t.  Nobody but God has the authority to tell a person he or she is born again!

A Pentecostal Holiness minister, pretty well known in the Pentecostal Holiness faith, was talking to my Father one time about receiving the holy Ghost before being baptized with it.  He was saying that a person receives the Spirit by portions, a little when he “gets saved”, a little more when he “gets sanctified”, and the rest when he receives the holy Ghost.  My father said, “If that’s true, then the holy Ghost comes into a person tail first because he doesn’t speak until the end.”  My father pointed out that “The scripture says, ‘God does not give the Spirit by measure.’”  Still, the respected minister didn’t budge.  He replied that in the process of being born again, that was how it happened.  My friend, no one receives a third of the Spirit when he “gets saved”, and another third of it when he “gets sanctified”, and another third when he receives the holy Ghost baptism.  A person either has the Spirit or he does not, and he does not have it until he is baptized with it and the Spirit speaks in tongues through him. That distinguished Pentecostal Holiness minister was trying to make my father feel irrelevant.

The Dean of the Graduate School of Theology at Oral Roberts University tried to make me feel irrelevant one evening as we sat together in his office, having a private conversation about the new birth.  His position was that people always receive the Spirit before they’re baptized with it.  I said, “Can you think of an example in the Bible of that?  Where did anybody receive God’s Spirit before He baptized them with it?”  He said, “Well, when Philip went up and preached to the Samaritans; it says they received the word of God, and then later on, Peter and John came up, and laid hands on them, and they received the holy Ghost.”  Then I said, “The Bible says that ‘the holy Ghost had come upon none of them’.  It says that Peter and John went and laid hands on them that ‘they might receive the holy Ghost, for as yet it had come upon none of them.’ ”  His reply?  “Well, the Bible just says it that way, but they really already had the Spirit.”  That world-renowned minister was not just trying to make me irrelevant so that he could cling to his own doctrine; he was trying to make the Bible irrelevant!  He was a celebrated leader among God’s people, but to me, he seemed very foolish.  What he said did not change the Bible at all, and as far as the truth was concerned, both he and his doctrine were irrelevant.

May God save us from this world’s efforts to make us feel irrelevant and to make us think that the truth Christ gives is irrelevant.  It is not irrelevant; it’s the saving gospel!  But God’s people have thrown the true gospel behind them, just as God’s people did in the Old Testament.   Yes, this has happened before, and through one of the prophets, God lamented, “Israel has rejected what is good!”

One of the great benefits of learning the Old Testament is that we can see that such a thing has happened before.  The spiritual condition of God’s people really has been this bad before.  God’s people really have been, as a whole, this far from the truth.  It is not a new thing for there to be but a remnant of God’s people who understand and love the truth.  In ancient Israel, matters grew so bad that when anyone dared to repent and walk according to the truth of the law, he became a target, a prey for cruel and proud people who belonged to God (Isa. 59:15).  So it is today.  Unbelievable as it may seem, it happened before, just as it is now, that truth itself perished from the minds of God’s people (Jer. 7:28).  It is nothing new that entire generations of God’s people live in complete ignorance of the truth, or that the truth itself is irrelevant to what they think and say and do.

Nevertheless, the truth is precious, and relevant to our salvation!  And you who know the truth are a chosen and blessed people!  The truth of Jesus Christ is not irrelevant to any man’s soul; it will either damn or justify every person who ever lives.  All people will be judged by the truth, and to understand the truth in this life, and to have it influence your conduct while you live is a gift from God!  Value the truth, and do not be discouraged by what they think or say who are ignorant of it.  Neither the truth nor those who live in it are irrelevant; the truth is the light of Jesus, and those who let it shine through them are shining beacons of love and hope in this very dark world.