And this is the final speaking tonight on
the subject of the Principalities and Powers of
the Air, so enormously important and central to
any consideration of a people who are determined
to be true church in the end times.
So don't think that in free speakings we've
exhausted the subject, we've only gotten into it,
and I just encourage you to study further
on your own, and I mention the names
of the books that have been inspirations to
me.
If you want to hear what I did
I'll see you afterwards and encourage you to
do that kind of reading also.
So let's pray for tonight's message, being reminded
that I think there are two more sessions
after this, and to be in prayer for
them that the Lord who was the Alpha
of our beginning will also be the Omega
of our conclusion and lead us to a
perfect and final word on that last one.
Precious God we just bow before you yet
once again loving you my God and praising
you for the God that you are who
has been so faithful to us my God
in these weeks, has sent us on such
a journey and has opened such things to
us my God, and has spoken to us
as sons and daughters, you've given it to
us straight my God, you've treated us like
mature saints, we appreciate that, you've given us
heavy content and you've repeated it and built
it up in such a way that we
can assimilate and take it into our spirit
and understanding, and you've encouraged us even tonight
to be heedful about your word and to
be prepared to act upon it, to walk
it out and to do it.
Lord bless the speaking now, by your spirit
anoint the mouth of the speaker, the ears
of the hearers, our hearts all together, give
us an occasion in you where your word
is event and that it may be consequential
my God for all the days ahead and
eternally.
We'll thank you and praise you now in
Jesus name, God's people say amen.
Okay, I think I began on the first
speaking with a scripture from Ephesians, the third
chapter which I want to share again.
Yeah, yeah he's in the back room, so
I think we're safe, just come in to
tell me when to close down.
Chapter three of Ephesians where Paul tells the
church at Ephesus that he who is the
least of all the saints in verse eight,
that a grace was given that he should
preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of
Christ and to make all people see what
is the fellowship of the mystery which from
the beginning of the ages has been hidden
in God who created all things through Jesus
Christ to the intent, I think King James
says in order that now the manifold wisdom
of God might be made known by the
church to the principalities and powers in the
heavenly places according to the eternal purpose which
he accomplished in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
So the issue of the principalities and the
powers has a practical immediate daily application and
concern for us, but it also needs to
be seen in the context of eternity.
That not only is it of eternal importance,
but God has created all things in order
that through the church a certain demonstration might
be made by it to the powers of
the air.
And this is absolutely bewildering.
This is beyond the scope of our normative
even Christian understanding.
It has nothing to do with anything practical
that we can understand.
It's an eternal demonstration.
It's an invisible spirit realm, and we hardly
even understand what it is that God wants
demonstrated.
But this we know that it must come
through the church, no other agency.
And for that purpose, God has created all
things in order that through the church.
So if we don't know anything else, we
know this, that if we have tolerated a
kind of corporate inferiority complex or regarded the
church in a mean and low way or
have seen it only in terms of its
value to us or the programs that it
provides or any other thing on that level,
we have missed the greatest point of all.
It behooves us to have an eternal, that
is to say, apostolic perspective about the church,
not only because it must come true in
eternity, but because the thing that we are
anticipating for eternity has reverberations and consequences now.
In fact, unless the church is seen in
its eternal purpose and in its eternal context,
we are robbed from the dynamic that makes
the church the viable and significant present that
God intends for in time.
So if you're a person who has been
given to compartmentalizing sacred and secular, the holy
and the profane, the temple, which means in
time, and the eternal, I want just to
rebuke it in Jesus' name, because God doesn't
know these kinds of categories and compartmentalizations.
These are conveniences for worldlings, but God is
imminently present in the eternal now, and he
wants us to come into his perspective and
his eternal sense of things.
To be charged with the weight of eternity
will have the profoundest consequence for our daily
acting.
So bless the Lord that he has an
eternal purpose, that he has created all things.
I mean, this is mind-boggling.
We're so impressed with civilization and its appurtenances,
and with history and with nations and politics,
that we think that these things are ends
unto themselves, that they're the real reasons for
being, and our lives are just so much
matchwood.
We're just the grist by which the world's
machinery is activated.
We've got it all wrong, and the world
has done a number on us.
Those things are incidental.
Those things are secondary.
Those things are just the framework and the
enablements for the purpose of one thing for
which God has created all things, that he
might through the church make an eternal demonstration
to the powers of the air of the
manifold wisdom of God.
So I want to address tonight in our
final speaking on this subject, what is that
manifold wisdom?
And I've already hinted at it by comparing
it with the wisdom of the powers themselves.
That is to say, the values, the construct,
the perception of things that are real, forces
that the powers employ and that they're seeking
to have entire mankind subscribe to.
Lust, ambition, vanity, pride, fear, threat, intimidation, and
all these things are aspects of the wisdom
of the powers of the air, the world
rulers of this darkness.
And we see those values throughout the entire
aspects of our civilization and our society.
And because they're so pronounced, because they've had
such long tenure, men tend to think them
normal, and that we ourselves subscribe to them,
not recognizing that not only they are different
from God's wisdom, they are altogether different and
contrary in every point and particular.
So we need to see a struggle between
two wisdoms, two value systems, the powers of
the air and that of God.
It's a cosmic struggle.
It's beyond the issue even of ourselves or
even of the earth.
It's eternal, and it has to do with
the whole of creation and the mastery over
it, because these powers are fallen angels, spirit
beings, invisible, out of order, have left their
first estate, as we're told, I think in
Jude, and not content to serve the purpose
for which they were created, to bring a
kind of organizing sense to the things that
would establish rule in the world.
They are the rulers of this world's darkness.
God intended them to rule to avoid chaos
and disorder, that men might have a structure
by which they might seek God and be
found with him.
And so these powers influence society, its structures,
its institutions, its agencies, nations themselves.
But because they're rebellious and because they have
gone beyond the intention of God, because they
tend to usurp, they seek not just to
influence but to win the allegiance and even
the loyalty of men and to be worshipped
as very gods themselves.
They are the gods of this world.
So lust, force, power, threat, seduction, intimidation, fear,
these are the characteristics of the wisdom of
the powers of the air by which they
have ruled and jerked and manipulated an entire
mankind until the advent of the cross.
And at the cross, another kind of wisdom
was displayed.
There was a confrontation, a heads-on encounter
between these two wisdoms, that Jesus, who came
in weakness and in humiliation and in patient
resignation to suffering in obedience to his father,
had to meet the fury of the wisdom
that was opposed to God, that majors on
violence, threat, force, and so on, by which
mankind has been coerced up until now.
Jesus submitted himself to those powers, and it
says that had they known they would not
have allowed the Son of Glory so to
be crucified, because in that they were dealt
an enormous blow, they were rendered disarmed, they
were fatally stopped in their tracks, and yet
they continue in that disarmed condition without authority,
which was broken at the cross, and yet
because mankind is ignorant about their existence and
about their influence, they still continue to, by
fear and by bluff and by threat and
so on, to influence the activity and the
conduct of men and of nations.
Only a church that knows of their existence,
that knows of their broken power, that knows
that their authority was shattered at the cross,
can reveal them for the bluff that they
are and encourage people in civilization, society itself,
to be free from their oppressive influence.
But the church itself that is still jerked
and manipulated, and the church itself that still
employs the wisdom of these powers through manipulation,
through worldly devices, is rendered absolutely without authority
to reveal and to show them forth.
Okay, so there's something at stake in the
cross, something performed at the cross, that is
greater than the issue of atonement, however great
that is, in the work of Jesus.
And the cross, every time that it is
proclaimed or demonstrated by the church, is another
unveiling or revealing of the forces that were
made in open spoil by Jesus at that
cross.
Little wonder that they're so, that the preaching
of the cross is rare.
You don't hear it that often.
You hear it, you hear it only lightly
in passing.
We don't hear men who seem to major
in the cross, and in a like manner,
just as the cross is neglected in preaching,
the cross has been neglected in our experience
and in the manifestation of a cross life.
Wherever there's a church that proclaims or demonstrates
the centrality and the power of the cross
there, and in that location, the principalities are
moved out of their orbit and are pushed
aside, and they're influence broken from those who
have been subject to their influence and to
their rule.
So the cross is enormously central in this
whole thing.
To quote one of my sources, the Dutch
theologian Burckhoff, the powers are limited by the
very presence of those who will no longer
let themselves be enslaved, led astray and intimidated.
In such reasons, another power is working more
powerfully than that which rules other men.
Power strives against power.
Wherever the power of the cross is operative
in the church, that power is striving against
the powers.
It's another power and has an effect on
that which would otherwise be unmoved in the
areas where we are.
The principalities of the earth over every city,
over every nation, over every locality in the
character somehow in keeping with the history of
that locality, with its wars, with its bloodshed,
with its violence, with its sin.
Somehow a particular kind of demonic structure has
been established because of the opportunities that have
been open to it in the history of
nations.
Which is why men like Derek Prince and
others talk about and pray for the revealing
of the name of the principality, being able
to deal with that specific entity and to
unseat him through the corporate intercession of the
church in that place.
Again, this theologian writes, all resistance and every
attack against the gods of this age will
be unfruitful unless the church herself is resistance
and attack.
Until she demonstrates in her life and fellowship
how men can live freed from the powers.
Praise God this is going on tape so
you can hear it again and I'll probably
repeat it again.
Just in the conversation today at the cafeteria
at the seminary with some students, coming away
from the daily chapel a little bit singed,
a little bit deflated, a little bit disappointed.
Sensing so much the ceremonialness of religion, the
verbalness, the phraseology, the saying of the correct
things without an appropriate power, without a reality.
And somehow being satisfied with that, that if
we invoke and say the correct things, that
that stands for and constitutes and is the
reality that it describes.
Something more is so urgently needed and we
have been content without that something more, content
with going through the phraseological forms.
This writer is saying the church itself needs
not only to proclaim something, but to be
something.
It needs to be a demonstration in the
life of the fellowship itself, how others can
live free from the powers.
One of the significances of the fact that
you gave over a thousand dollars for Zaire,
a fellowship that you've never met in a
part of the world, you may never likely
be.
The generosity that you did was exactly that
demonstration.
If there was a fear that came upon
you when you wrote your check, how will
this affect the monthly budget and doesn't this
threaten something that is so needful for the
family and something that we've been waiting for
and you had a bit of a palpitation
in the writing of that check for the
body of Christ, black and ignorant and abjectly
poor, thousands of miles from yourself, something more
was affected than the issue of help.
The thing that was affected was a breaking
in, a loosing from the sense of restriction,
fear, intimidation, that what's the word, stinginess, that
the carefulness that has characterized our lives too
much for now.
Though we say that the Lord has the
cattle on a thousand hills, how we have
lived and acted is more in keeping with
the temerity and the fearfulness of the world
and its insecurity than those who believe that
indeed he does own all things.
So we have to demonstrate and this opportunity
was given us and I pray we're on
from demonstration to demonstration until the last vestige
and hangover of being jerked and manipulated by
these spirit forces has been so decisively dealt
with that we constitute a presence and a
demonstration to the community around us that one
can be freed from these bedeviling and fearful
intimidating influences.
To be free in Christ is to be
free indeed.
So something needs not only to be proclaimed
but to be demonstrated in the very life
of the church that it itself lives freed
from manipulation.
But what if the church itself manipulates?
What if we did a song and a
dance to take the offering for Zaire?
What if we made an emotional appeal?
What if we encouraged you in some false
way?
What if we sent out four color lithograph
appeals in the mailboxes of the kind that
mass mailing systems that are statistically mathematically guaranteed
to bring certain response?
Well we might have gotten the money but
we would have lost the battle.
We would have been playing upon you in
a spirit of manipulation as is too often
the case now in Christendom that is exactly
in keeping with the wisdom of the powers
of the air.
Therefore a simple appeal, just making the need
known, trusting the spirit of God to work
in the heart of the believer, being grateful
for what is provided, asking the Lord to
multiply is a whole different mentality and lifestyle
in keeping with God's own wisdom.
So we need to recognize that in every
issue there is something more than the issue.
There is something more than the issue of
money.
There is something more than the issue of
security.
There is the issue of a wisdom which
God wants to inculcate the church.
Because how are we going to be the
eternal demonstration?
After we leave the earth?
When do we learn it?
When do we come into that wisdom that
we are going to eternally demonstrate if we
don't obtain it here in the issues of
life that are before us now both personally
and corporately.
That's why the church is so monumentally important.
That's why it deserves so much more than
mere Sunday attendance.
There are issues before us that only come
to us corporately in the church and to
break through and to be loosed from these
intimidating powers we need one another.
One another's example, one another's prayer, one another's
encouragement that we might all come.
This is the demonstration.
That's eternal.
God took a people who were nothing.
He took us in our condition of sin,
in our arrogance, in our conceit, in our
rebellion, in our money-grubbing, in our lusting.
He saved us.
He turned us.
He redeemed us.
He imputed righteousness.
He shapes our character and life.
And he sets us forth to the eternal
praise of his glory as a demonstration of
those mocking powers whom we will one day
replace when we rule and reign within.
We're being prepared for something and we need
consciously to know it and to receive every
episode that comes into our life as being
from the hand of God for that preparation.
Doesn't that charge our life with so much
more meaning?
We alone have significance.
No wonder the world is freaking out in
its boredom and looking for its entertainments and
finding more and more bizarre expressions until when
the smoke clears at the end of the
age, it'll be a Sodom and Gomorrah.
But we who are engaged with God in
eternal purposes that are having consequence in time
and in eternity together in relationship and the
things that are authentic, my God, where's the
place for boredom?
What comes to us that is not charged
with significance?
A sniffle, a cold, a headache, a sickness
is an issue of prayer, of faith, of
relationship, of character, of life.
Everything.
So long as we are unconscious of this
and are moving in the wisdom of the
powers themselves, we constitute no witness against them.
We need to display that not only are
we free from the fear of insecurity, but
we are joyfully free.
There are certain things that can't be imitated.
They can't be fabricated.
Either you have them or you have them
not.
Meekness, humility, joy.
And to have them not just when you're
well fed and prospering and sailing along gladly,
but to have them in adversity, to have
them in affliction, to have them in suffering,
to have them in a cell bound hand
and foot with your back hanging in ribs
and strips and Philippi is the ultimate expression
of overcoming faith, of a joy of such
a kind that when the enemy hears and
sees that expression, he's finished.
He recoils, he shrinks, he flees in horror
from the demonstration of that kind of authenticity
that cannot be famed.
The scriptures speak about love unfamed, faith unfamed,
love one another with a pure heart fervently
unto unfamed love of the brethren.
No more taxi full gospel bear hugs and
little chucks under the cheek.
That's a no-no.
It was okay in an earlier time, but
it's not okay apostolically and it'll never serve
eternally.
You know what you're going to find to
go from the bear hug to unfamed love?
You may find yourself plunged into an unspeakable
darkness.
I hope you can follow me in this.
You were sailing along beautifully.
You were the epitome of the charismatic saint.
You were sweetness and light and you glad
-handed back bear hug to everyone.
And then because God is wanting to bring
you into the authentic and the transcendent place,
somehow it's not just a graduation of a
continuing on, but somehow coming into a darkness
and a wretchedness and a revelation of, my
God, I'm incapable of real affection.
I really don't even care.
I'm shocked at what I see in myself
and the indifference.
And I got a feeling that to go
from the charismatic to the apostolic, that somehow
we're not going to miss this experience in
darkness before we come into the thing that
is authentic.
And are we willing to give up the
thing that is frothy, specious, superficial, that serves
for our purposes?
It made our fellowship warmer and blessed our
days, but will it stand eternally?
Is it impressive to the powers who know
Paul and know Jesus, but who are only
required to recognize that which is unmistakably authentic,
like joy, like true praise, like unfeigned love,
like a faith that will give for Zaire
even to the point where you threaten your
own security and well-being.
That kind of authenticity the powers recognize.
To come to that is not without struggle
and not without suffering.
It's the very cross itself.
There's no cheap and easy route to authenticity.
Even the willingness to see the charismatic substitute,
if I could put it that way, sacrificed,
let go for the thing that is real,
is painful.
The cross is the issue of suffering and
there's no circumventing it because that is where
the wisdom of God was demonstrated by Jesus
and that's where it is that the ultimate
wisdom of God is to be demonstrated, made
manifest by the church.
When our praise swells up to heaven, when
it's more than the product of choruses, when
it's a true celebration of God who has
freed us because of what he has done
at the cross and brought us into a
triumphant place with him, despite the powers, free
from fear where we can confront the mafia
as we thought before and not tremble because
you know that the issue of life or
death or violence and harm is not with
men but with God, you could do nothing
against me except that we're giving you from
above and really believe it and if it
is given you're just as willing to receive
that as to go on in bodily well
-being.
Someone asked me tonight about cancer before the
meeting and what do I do and how
do I pray and the opportunities seem to
be coming increasingly frequently even among the saints.
I said sometimes I find myself getting mad
and crushing the filthy thing and commanding it
to perish and see miraculous recovery or other
times as we're doing right now with a
brother in our encouraging him to fight the
good faith.
It's a slow process of regaining cell by
cell out of the clutches of death and
being restored by the life of God through
praise and through actual faith and taking the
land a cell at a time and there
are other times when I told him that
the Lord impressed me to ask a woman
who was an impeccable saint whose husband was
a rat.
He's the one who should have been languishing
in death and disease.
He was abounding in health and she who
was the epitome of sainthood was dying at
the age of 35 of cancer and men
were coming to her door saying that if
you really had faith or if you're hidden
sin you would need not suffer this thing
but the word that the Lord gave me
was are you willing as much to glorify
God in your dying as you are in
your living.
If you're being taken by God prematurely by
human reckoning at the age of 35 with
young children and allowing them to be in
the hands of an unsaved husband by the
way who subsequently I believe was saved by
the demonstration of his wife's patience in suffering
and resignation unto death as coming from the
hand of the Lord with sweetness without a
murmur without indignation without even a scrooge of
why or talking about the injustice of it
or any such reckoning just as much submitting
to that destiny for herself as Jesus did
for the cross was such a demonstration to
this man as well as to the powers
it was a key to his conversion.
If the issue is celebrating God if the
issue is his glory rather than our self
-perpetuation what's the difference to us whether that
is affected in 50 60 or 70 years
or more on this earth or if the
Lord is pleased to do it in one
fell swoop by a martyrdom by an inexplicable
suffering by whatever we'll always be subject to
fear and second guessing if we live in
a tremulous state that does not have an
absolute confidence in the God in whose hands
we are and that we have settled the
issue that the purpose for our life and
being is not our self-perpetuation or our
comfort or our gratification but his glory and
when the power see a church that believes
that and live as if they believe that
they're finished the final reactive consummated they are
done in once and for all because what
shall they use to intimidate us or what
shall we be afraid of their powers their
script of their of whatever instrument they might
employ we've shown them to be the open
mock that they are so we need to
make as our conscious intent true faith true
praise true love authenticity in all things and
it's not going to come lightly or easily
but it needs to be consciously our purpose
i wrote here well this is really the
transcript of what was spoken extemporaneously you can
understand that that's more than an institution that
provides religious services a church of that kind
it is a people who live without fear
who are already in the realm of the
eternal who are joyfully freed from the power
of mammon who are walking in light and
in righteousness and in truth this is a
calling for a church that is more than
just a casual conglomerate of individuals this is
a people who are really together because no
one of us can make this by ourselves
no one of us has such a spirituality
such singular dedication that we can attain this
without the encouragement and the exhortation or the
rebuke if it's needed from one another either
we're going to obtain this corporately or we're
not going to have it at all we
wrestle not against flesh and blood but against
the principalities and powers of the air so
we need to come into a quality of
relationship of corporateness of such a kind that
has not been known since the early church
there was not a one among them it
said who had need they didn't go for
the social security program or to the state
office there was not one among them that
had need for those that had lands and
houses sold and laid the proceeds at the
feet of the apostles who made distribution that
there was not one among them who had
need the quality of their life the issues
of their faith was expressed economically and socially
as well as spiritually in fact really to
say it truthfully what we expressed economically and
what we express socially is spiritual and maybe
the deepest expression of it so what happens
when the a church getting earnest with that
kind of determination think they're going to twiddle
their thumbs and lean back and let us
go at it without interruption and without the
response we can expect repercussion oppression and persecution
and that's been the history of the church
in fact the absence of those things in
modern times in the church in the west
has been a statement of our scandal that
somehow a church should exist without experiencing some
kind of retaliation some kind of reaction from
these powers through men in society is a
statement that we have not challenged them that's
what happened to jesus that's what happened to
the apostles that's what happened to the early
church they invoked the retaliation of the powers
by the very conduct and quality of their
life and it will be so for us
also right to the end of the age
how did jesus and the apostle and the
apostolic church act when those persecutions came upon
them in meekness and in humility as did
jesus in fact when these powers collide in
the issue of persecution there's two great m's
that i have devised that really show the
issue the malignancy of the powers malign malicious
evil vile brutal meets the magnanimity of god
gracious gentle patient and we know who won
the thing that was weak and the thing
that was despised the thing that was humiliating
the thing that was suffered under death of
a one who went as a lamb to
the slaughter silently without complaint without protest without
even such defense is the thing that triumphed
the wisdom of god he bruised the head
of the serpent by that demonstration but it
is given to us to complete what he
began so can you imagine a church of
that in that character and that kind of
authority did i did i mention to you
the episode of uh the call from africa
from an american consulate official not wanting to
grant the visa to these two black to
the two africans who are coming to us
and how the lord inspired a letter to
remind this official that there's a thin line
between what is official and what is officious
that god has established the boundaries and that
it's our function as the church and the
knowledge of the scripture to remind government what
its limitations are and that when i heard
that from those who were there that when
he got that letter he was furious and
enraged but he released them because his rage
was only a reflection of the rage of
the powers that operated through him that we're
hearing a word under the anointing of god
that says this far no further and you're
precious edification one of those two men is
the black brother jerry kafuna who went to
the fellowship in zaire and brought them the
message of salvation and the baptism of the
holy spirit and revival and rejoicing see how
how significant these issues are by by a
church that will walk in this wisdom so
that wisdom is reflected for example in the
foolishness of preaching i'm a paper on that
subject for one of my courses that had
pleased god by the foolishness of preaching to
save them that will believe if you don't
understand that verse you've never stood in the
open air or in the drizzle and in
the rain or at the midget state university
under those conditions and watch people go behind
you to avoid you and you're speaking to
the plain air or on broadway and 87th
street new york city virtually on the soapbox
and get kicked in the shins or have
have jews and radicals curse you and call
your names or walk by and spit on
the sidewalk or talk about foolishness there's nothing
more foolish than preaching and not always to
the unsafe even to the people of god
you feel the foolishness of proclaiming the word
i feel it every once in a while
and every time i stand before god's people
not knowing how it's going to come out
not knowing whether it's going to be a
dud having to run that risk knowing that
that that the issue is with god the
proclamation of the word of god itself is
the reflection of the wisdom of god which
is foolishness which is weakness which is humiliation
and the reason that we have not seen
much powerful preaching is because of men who
consciously take the seek the assurances that will
free them from the risk of humiliation that
is to say completely written texts and even
rehearsed before mirrors that the inflection will be
proper so that they can be assured that
no one will be offended they'll have the
applause both of their students and their colleagues
and they'll have given a perfectly credible biblical
and scriptural uh doctrinal word and yet without
the power because the power is the demonstration
of the cross the power is the sign
of the weakness in which the ministry was
performed we're called to foolishness we're called to
a faith that is completely out of joint
and out of tune and out of kilter
with the world in which we have been
set the world is practicing its halloween with
its witches and and ditchy goo and all
that stuff as if this is some kind
of cutesy uh cultural thing and we're in
the church talking with great earnestness about the
reality of the invisible spirit realm knowing that
these things would mock us in their sight
as strange that indeed we will be strangers
pilgrims and sojourners in the earth something
broke in paul when he saw a a
waiter of tables what do you call that
a bus boy die magnificently being stoned to
death by inches heard the front of the
stones and watched the blood trickle into his
eyes and sent in his own flesh the
pain of what this uh jewish man was
experiencing and yet recognized that though he was
supremely a privileged student and looking at only
a bus boy that that bus boy was
demonstrating something more glorious in his death than
paul had ever known in his life and
to hear this man it with his final
breath saying to god lay not their sin
to their charge i mean that that is
so contradictory that every natural thing that wells
up when your flesh is being started against
by stones is to retaliate to get even
to get back to let them have it
to at least curse them but to pray
for those who despitefully wish you to be
merciful to those who who exploit you to
forgive those who are doing you in even
while you're being done in is a demonstration
of the wisdom of god and something has
got to turn in the air and in
those powers that has held men captive i
think something happened right there with saul that
released him for a revelation that came only
a short time later that was the beginning
of his enormous apostolic career i could think
of one instance with my own wife and
not to get too biographical and there's been
a lot of vexation and a lot of
rubbing and irritation of a gentile and a
jew and a new york sophisticate and a
simple danish village girl it's been a saga
and it's not over yet and how often
would before i recognized these things did i
retaliate in kind did something involuntarily rise up
out of me to get even to get
my two cents in to let her know
i remember on one occasion she was at
her vexing best i often say that the
anger is to me as the jews were
to luther and indeed the issue is very
much the same if we can rise above
the test of being vexed at a place
where someone reaches in and finds that area
where we're most susceptible and trigger something and
you just feel it rising up a moment's
indignation and there's even a lust of the
mind it's a lust to get that word
in and get back at him with that
word but for some reason by the grace
of god in that moment instead of reacting
in that way which would have provoked her
even further and moved us into the wisdom
of the powers in which they would have
rubbed their hands and glee and relished the
situation that was being provoked i said to
her with just i turned quietly i said
something like you're a most unreasonable woman and
all of a sudden inga's eyes blinked and
i i'm sure i heard something and the
heavenlies go click something snapped something turned and
i saw the release right in front of
me in this wife the argument went out
of her something happened the powers were broken
from affecting that moment and we turned to
the thing that was good we're going to
have opportunity under vexation under distress under great
pressure as things come to tom to a
tumultuous head in an age of increasing unrest
right till the day of the lord's coming
how are we going to respond how are
we going to act what wisdom will we
demonstrate is the whole issue of what god
wants eternally demonstrated but is going to be
obtained by us with our inders and with
that that one with in the office or
the secretary or the guy at work or
the foreman or wherever it is our own
kids or the one in the congregation where
these issues are being worked out that that
established the whole issue of the eternal demonstration
of the church so how shall we
react is the issue which is before us
now our little impatiences our critical spirit and
disdain our irritation for one another or with
one another is already an evidence of how
little prepared we are for this how foolish
we are that the very things that we
have complained about in the church namely the
trials and the irritations that come to us
from other saints is exactly the provision of
god for the shaping of his wisdom in
us and what have we done we try
to find another congregation or we flip to
another place or or we move aside or
not understanding that the church is the very
laboratory it's the very matrix where god is
working out the issue of his character and
his wisdom by what we are to each
other because isn't it a strange way that
no one can do another in like one's
husband or one's wife you can hear the
same remark made by by a relative stranger
it bounces off you without any effect but
to hear your wife say it or your
husband say it or someone in the church
to snub you or to do you dirty
or to forget you or whatever it so
compounds the injury and the pain i would
just say in my 22 year history as
a believer there's no suffering that for me
has been more excruciating than what i have
received in the church from the saints it's
easier to face the outraged rabbis and the
bobs of angry jews than to receive the
particular kind of injury that can only come
to us in a church where a brother
raises a question about your dedication or someone
for whom you have sacrificed and striven says
you're an enemy of the gospel or you're
completely misunderstood and misread these kinds of things
are not only inevitable but intentional in of
god for the shaping of our character in
life we need to receive the church not
as dreamers and idealists who want some kind
of fanciful and ideal fellowship that is always
beautiful in its choruses but to recognize that
what church is is the reality the grit
the relationships the strain the differences the vexations
that promote the things that god wants for
eternal demonstration and to give yourself to that
not to ring your fingers say hunk why
me why my fellowship but to recognize hey
we must be course god is favoring us
look at our problems what
happens when we speak a soft word that
expresses the wisdom of god rather than the
anger and the vexation of the powers is
that by some ability in ourselves by by
what ability did jesus suffer the taunts and
the years of men and the physical abuse
and torture of the cross it says that
he yielded his life by the eternal spirit
the spirit of god was a grace given
and even demonstrated in his willing suffering unto
death and it will be demonstrated by us
when we put aside the mind lust that
wants to get even wants to get back
what wants to retaliate and suffer not indulging
that and by another spirit express the wisdom
of god that spirit is the eternal spirit
of god that spirit is god and when
that spirit is expressed god is expressed and
where god is expressed there is authenticity and
where that is expressed the powers recoil and
i tell you about the time in the
community when we did battle against the powers
and felt an actual release in heaven in
intercession two illustrations that i want to give
before i close for all of the vexation
and strain and stress that we experienced for
years in community in northern minnesota and they're
compounded when you live with the same people
every day and you're sharing a common purse
and the issues of finance are so vexing
and how do you distribute the meager amount
that you have and this need is going
to be neglected and someone's going to be
offended if you address yourself to this these
problems they can't be avoided and so there
are strains and tensions you wonder if you'll
ever make it through and yet you stay
together where else shall you go he has
the words of eternal life and god has
brought you so far in a remote place
that you can't go or many of us
would have beat it and so you come
every day to the prayer meeting and you
come heavy-hearted and and the enemy is
playing upon you so oppressively to get you
to give up this vain undertaking of seeking
to find your way back into some kind
of biblical new testament christianity that can be
called apostolic it's a struggle it would be
much easier it'd be a relief to find
a charismatic fellowship that makes not these demands
of these requirements and we came to one
of our morning prayer meetings that day of
heaviness was so unbearable we could barely lift
our heads no song leader looking at each
other the adults of the community sitting in
a circle think of thinking of the unresolved
tensions that yet remain between many of us
and thinking that maybe it's just yourself suffering
that heaviness and then someone finally says i
think boy i'm really feeling bowed over and
everyone says yeah i feel that too and
before we know it we realize it's not
just some individual idiosyncratic thing in us there
are powers of the air actually exerting an
oppressive spirit against our community and so i
encourage them to pray you know there's praying
and praying like there's faith and faith and
praise and praise and love and love there's
the true thing and the faint and we
began to pray but i tell you i
had to stop them and say you think
this is going to succeed put your gut
into it and i know what else was
said but if you walked in five minutes
later you would have thought it was an
insane asylum some were stretched out on their
faces some were standing some were kneeling one
brother was punching at the air flailing away
every kind of posture of deep intercession by
people who to give a give a rap
how they look to each other because we
have been in it too long to be
concerned how we appear to each other we
were beyond that kind of outward and fast
style thing there was a battle going on
and it was remarkable how how the momentum
of that spiritual thing picked up in the
prayer that deepened and as we're in the
midst of it i had a vision of
a faith as it began looking down upon
us gloating from ear to ear with a
smirk haha the bengal community they're full of
problems they're riddled through that they can't find
their way they're they're always struggling but as
the crescendos of these authentic intercession corporate began
to rise up i watched that smirk wipe
off that face and a look of fear
come into it and i watched this filthy
thing begin to back up and i sensed
that we were pressing in and there came
a moment when that thing broke and began
to flee and we pursued after it in
the realm of spirit you don't know what
i'm talking about we need to know something
was taking place and we continued on till
i saw a great fist break through and
like pieces and fragments splattered and flying out
all the place and in that moment this
one began to laugh that one began to
giggle this one was hysterical that one was
rolling on the floor no one said laugh
but we we sensed in that moment such
a triumphant victory such a rejoicing such a
foolishness that was expressed in that way and
something lifted something was moved away by the
authenticity of that corporate intercession it took several
years to come to that place and we
only tasted it once but i know that
it's there to be had one other and
final illustration one of our friday night potluck
community suppers we had a community room that
we bought from the university of limigi for
eleven hundred dollars metal building and moved it
18 miles a section at a time no
plumbing no heating we got it wired insulated
room that was our meeting place in the
winter friday night potluck what does that mean
the women cook in their trailers wrap the
dishes in quilts bundle their kids up put
on their snow shoes and their galoshes it's
a promotion it's a production they get them
out time the food get there it's cold
not everybody's on time you know the way
it is all you know what the point
it's only fellowship but we assembled do not
forsake the assembling of yourselves together all the
more as you see the end approaching and
so we ate together breaking bread and sang
a few choruses there's nothing to write home
about nothing sensational and a couple that had
just come back to us a mexican-american
couple who had been down to texas and
into mexico gave a little report of the
blessing that they brought to these simple peasant
believers in and largely what they brought them
was things that were worked out of our
own guts out of our own travail out
of our own struggle and it blessed them
south of the border and when they finished
that somehow we found ourselves on our feet
somehow we're beginning to praise god somehow we're
beginning to think that maybe it was worthwhile
after all that there was something redemptive being
corporately corporatively formed in this body that was
having some little impact and effect in mexico
or elsewhere that the struggle was worthwhile that
something was being refined that there was something
in this interplay of life with life that
was consequential and that god was in it
with all of the struggle all of the
suffering of it and we began to lift
our hands nobody prompted us it was praise
it was war it was out of the
depths of the soul and as it was
ascending up to heaven again i i sensed
something moved in the heavenlies something recoiled could
not stand to hear land with its fingers
in its ears at the authentic praise that
was coming up from the earth from the
saints who have been experiencing the true redemptive
work of god in the church we wrestle
not the weapons of our warfare are not
called the whole issue of the powers is
the issue of the church both in time
and eternity because god has created all things
in order that through the church the eternal
the wisdom of god the manifold wisdom of
god might be demonstrated to the principalities and
the powers of the air and this is
the eternal purpose of god in christ jesus
that's only for church that sees that recognizes
that rejoices for that devotes itself to that
consciously desires its fulfillment a consecrated and a
committed people who want to go beyond meetings
beyond services and into these realities and into
this demonstration though they know it's going to
be an issue of suffering i want to
pray for eastern annual because god has appointed
it that's why we're here that's why he's
established these weeks that's why he has been
speaking these words that's why he even told
us tonight before the message ever came listen
to what i'm saying hawk into my word
resolve to take it to yourself to do
it i'm sending you messages i'm preparing you
for end time eventualities understand your sufferings understand
your afflictions understand your problems don't look upon
it as some kind of capricious thing that
makes no sense it's a being fitted being
formed to express the manifold wisdom of god
patience and suffering meekness humility yielding to the
sovereignty of god's will rejoicing in our distress
giving him praises no matter even in adversity
so precious god we count ourselves privileged my
god we would eternally rule we would spit
out our guts eternally if we learned too
late that our churchianity was a mock a
play acting a going through motions a phraseological
thing a mere sunday thing a slap on
the back and that we had missed the
true substantive eternal purposes for which you have
created all things and we did not give
ourselves to it with the earnestness that it
deserves lord we're privileged that you have saved
us out of death and into your eternal
purpose and we want to say tonight we
received such a call we willingly embrace it
my god we're willing for whatever is needful
we acknowledge that we're soft and indulgent that
we do indulge our mind lusts to speak
back and to retaliate and to get even
we want the last word but we want
you to break the power of that we
want you to form your character in us
we want you to teach us how to
speak a word in season or to be
silent in our suffering and not answer back
that no matter what the vexation no matter
what the distress something shall go forth both
in time and eternity to your eternal praise
bless this people my god give them sober
hearts and yet hearts of rejoicing we love
you and we thank you that there's going
to be such a church it's already on
the way that something therefore is going to
be moved out of the way that has
kept men in bondage in these things