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Wednesday night live is a weekly sharing of the word from the Father's Church in Dallas, Tx.
Hello, everyone, and welcome once again to Wednesday Night Live. This is Ron Crawford, and I'm coming to you from the Father's Church in Dallas, Texas. And it is a great blessing to reach out to our Saints Network family and, of course, to do that in conjunction with our Father's Church congregation who is joining with us as well today. We're looking forward to welcoming so many from a great number of places in the world to our seminar, the patient's seminar, that two weeks from today, if you're listening to it on September 2, what is it the second? Let's see.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's September 2. These months just kinda fly by. And the older you get, they they really do seem to whip by. Seems like when you're a kid, days just go on forever.
Speaker 1:You know? How many more days till Christmas? How many more days till school is out? How many more days until I can get my driver's license? And now you think, gee, this year's over already.
Speaker 1:I don't know why that is, but in two weeks from today, seminar begins. And if you are planning to be here, we welcome you. But if you can't be here, we're going to be live streaming. We would ask that you access this website if you're listening in conjunction with the website, if you're on Spotify or some other vehicle, go to the website and register. We'd love for you to register if to let us know if you're gonna be here in person or if you're going be here online.
Speaker 1:There's a reason for that, and I'm not going to regale them. Some people would say, well, if I'm going to walk you online, why do I need to register? Well, there may be things here, I said I wasn't going to regale it. There may be things we want to reach out to you about. There may be ways that, we need to make adjustments to the schedule, and if you're not here, you may not know them.
Speaker 1:So please register one way or the other. I'm not gonna go on and on about that. Forgive me for regaling when I said I would not. So registration, please go and do that. Just some housekeeping.
Speaker 1:We have a very busy week ahead of us. This weekend is is really a week of of prayer. First Saturday prayer, this coming Saturday, the directive went out yesterday. We have the Friday devotional wherein we have been offering a specific theme for the weeks leading up to our seminar, and I hope you have been availing yourself of that. A week from today, September 9, we will be praying here at the Father's Church in our sanctuary, 06:00.
Speaker 1:Some of you can't be here at six. Well, I'm sure there'll still be plenty of prayer left if you can get here at 06:30. And we're going to be welcoming the purpose of the Lord for the upcoming seminar. Some will have already arrived. I know our, I have a dear brother that's coming in this coming Sunday from Brazil, and others will be arriving throughout the week, and then it's just an interesting time leading up to seminar, so we need to bathe it in prayer.
Speaker 1:So that's a week from today, September 9. We've already been praying, as you might imagine, And one of the ministry groups here at the church, our prophetic presbytery teams prayed this past weekend. And I really appreciate Dennis and Tammy Stewart who are heading that ministry so faithfully for many, many years now. They compiled a synopsis of the words that were submitted. I just not gonna read them all verbatim.
Speaker 1:You didn't tune in to hear a fivefold report, but I'm going to touch base on just a couple that are really profound, and I'm not going to highlight the names. Okay? Someone says, I saw beams of light all over the earth extending into heaven. I was made aware that these beams of bright light were saints standing in their terrio, faithfully partnering with the throne of God in intercession. These are the conduits of bringing heaven to earth.
Speaker 1:The heavenly father wants to strengthen each of us in our place of standing. The longer I prayed, the brighter the lights became. Light then began to spread out from these pillars and cover the continent in which they were placed. The more the light spread, the beam was not diminished, but burned brighter. The father wants to remind us of the importance of our placement and the authority he has given us to impact our nations.
Speaker 1:Our intercession is what strengthens and fuels the place of standing. I saw a row of white houses that had multiple levels containing several windows. They were empty and currently in the shadows. Our intercession brings light to them until it shined out all of the windows. Houses represent an intimate place where individuals carry out activities most personal to them in conjunction with their created identity.
Speaker 1:So that is a wonderful word. There are a lot of great words. Here's another one about an illumination of bright lights burning in the presence of the Lord as he shined down on the prayer time this morning. I saw the armies of the Lord ready for battle, stepping into new places, ready and willing to serve in this hour. These are the faithful sons determined to fulfill their purpose in the Lord.
Speaker 1:Another word about, provision and how it's it's coming and it's going to be initiated as in conjunction with this gathering. So many really powerful words just from a prayer time that occurred this past Saturday. And some people say, well, what are these words? Well, the Bible says that when you pray in the spirit, you should interpret. The Bible says that when you're offering supplication, you should be gaining insights that you then begin to declare.
Speaker 1:That's the Greek term pros prosuque. And, these are all in the New Testament. They may not be in your flashy passion bibles, but they're they're there. And I I'm just really blessed by these words, and, I I'm not gonna read all of them. There are a whole lot of them.
Speaker 1:But just know that the prayers of the saints are being used by God to welcome what it is that he's doing in these days. The Bible says that God searches for people who will do this kind of thing. He always is looking for an intercessor to partner with. And, you know, I've said this in the past, this is not my message for today, but this type of prayer and it's not just prophesying, you know, anybody with any kind of a spiritual gift, and I'm not diminishing prophecy, but there were a lot of people who were prophesying during the early days of my life who were just prophesying out of their gift, and that's fine. But God really wants partners who will intercede.
Speaker 1:And I remember one time we had a visiting minister from an Eastern European country. He had a wonderful church and at some point, we were discussing our going there. It was into the nation of Hungary. And I just never felt the timing of the Lord to press that. We could have done it easily.
Speaker 1:We had the invitation. But, this man said that he was too busy to pray, and I understand that. I I don't under I don't agree with it, but I understand the expression that he hired people to pray. And, boy, wouldn't that be something to hire people to pray? What is what's the going rate for an intercessor?
Speaker 1:Do you pay them according to their effectiveness? I don't know. Do you get pay raises? Oh, this person's been praying for fifteen years. He he needs to be bumped up.
Speaker 1:Do you get vacations with that? I don't know. But, you know, you you God looks for an intercessor. And when I was growing up, people prayed. We had prayer meetings, but it was always largely for one or two things.
Speaker 1:And some of you feel like I'm trampling on your venerated observances, but you have to agree with me that this is true. Number one, either they were coming to repent of things that they shouldn't be doing, and we need that. But if the same people are coming every week repenting of the same thing, something's broken in that process. Or secondly, they're praying for a long list of requests, asking God to do this, asking God to do that. And if you were really effective at that, you gained a following and they would contribute their request to you, and, that was prayer.
Speaker 1:Or in the established churches, you had book of prayer, so you could turn to the back page of whatever hymnal or devotional manual in the pew and you could read the prayer. That's interesting. I remember going, my twin granddaughters used to go to a Lutheran church and I blessed them, really nice people. But when I would go to their services, they would tell you the page to turn to and either you would read the prayer or the priest would read, and then everybody would say some kind of an affirmative, and you had to go through all these these different liturgies, and I bless those folks. But when we've studied the scripture, that's really not what God is wanting.
Speaker 1:He's wanting partners, And there are so many passages of scripture and so many themes of the original language that indicate that you come praying in partnership with God. And your supplication and your willingness especially to pray in the spirit and then to hear from God, that is I grew up in church. I studied in a Bible, well known recognized Bible college, which is now a university, and a seminary, and I never heard any of this. And, you know, I don't fault those folks, but my point is that it's largely missing, and it's right there throughout the Bible. So we ought to be spending time in prayer.
Speaker 1:We ought to be waiting on the Lord, praying in the spirit, listening to his voice, studying the word based upon what God is showing you, how he's leading you. And, you know, there's two facets. I just have to clarify this because I think there's always purists that are listening, looking to find fault. I study the word daily. I study things not just for what I'm trying to have to preach or teach.
Speaker 1:I try to learn the histories. I try to learn the schematics of biblical characters, what made them what they were from the word. And I just do that so it's a foundation. So when I'm praying and the Holy Spirit enlivens a certain thought, I will pursue that directive from the scripture and it is really it has proven to be of great value in understanding things that I never saw. The living word continues to breathe.
Speaker 1:It is based on the foundation, not of your tradition, not of your personal experience, but on the scripture. And, you know, that's what God wants us to be, and it is the lifeline of understanding of the deeper things of the word. And there are a lot of deeper things in the word. If you get to the point and you say, that's all she wrote or that's all he wrote, I know everything. I've got it all.
Speaker 1:You know, was driving in Dallas. We have thousands of churches. In fact, they said recently, and this was a study that was done, this isn't me hypothesizing, that in the Metroplex, expanded Metroplex area, there were at least 7,000 churches. That's hard to imagine. But these people were secular people, so they had no reason to be evangelistic about it.
Speaker 1:I don't know the motive of their study. Maybe they were trying to figure out ways to get nonprofits to pay taxes. I don't know. That's always a driving factor, isn't it? But there are churches everywhere, and a lot of them have gone progressive, a lot of them are dead as a doornail, some of them are mega, mega churches that are like little cities, and that's their identity.
Speaker 1:Some of them are social climes, Some of them are just functioning on behalf of political causes. There's a lot of them. But I always read the message that's on the church sign. And I went past a church that for many years protested our changing of our name to the Father's Church because we were denying our heritage. And I saw that they had also backslidden and changed their name.
Speaker 1:But they had on their sign Pentecostal since 1912. And I just kind of chuckled because I thought, yeah, and you're probably, first of all, not aware of what that meant in 1912. Listen, I read as part of my work responsibility, it was a blessing, When I was in a particular city that was the headquarters of that particular movement, I had the responsibility going through files from the early days of the movement and processing handwritten letters that were written to the leadership. And a lot of the things that I wrote read coming from pastors and evangelists and those that were responsible for reporting what was going on as the movement spread. There were some interesting racial qualities too.
Speaker 1:I don't know that they still have those letters. You know, if I had known then, of course I was just 18, 19 years old, can you imagine? What were you doing when you were 18 and 19? Don't tell me, we'll have to have a prayer meeting about that. But I should have, if I could go back and keep those, those would have been an interesting resource to write a book.
Speaker 1:What did it mean to be Pentecostal in 1912, 1913, 1914? What did that mean? And even in the late eighteen hundreds, what did that really mean? It meant a whole lot more than it does now. And I kind of laughed as I was driving by just to myself because I thought, yeah, you just keep holding on to that.
Speaker 1:You just you just keep holding on to that. But what is the Holy Spirit doing now? If you're doing the same old things in the same old way, are you still driving a horse and buggy? Are you still, well, I won't elaborate on that. Pentecostal since 1912.
Speaker 1:That was interesting. Boy, I'm really rambling here, aren't I? But I appreciate the fact that Saints from around the world are praying in the spirit. They're applying biblical principles that have been long either forgotten or ignored or even opposed. I, I appreciate the desire to apply the biblical mandate to interpret, not translate, not to yay, yay my people, I'm coming soon, but to really sense what the Holy Spirit is saying in those long diatribes.
Speaker 1:Of course, you know, when I was growing up, I would hear what is nominally known as a message in tongues almost every Sunday morning service. It was always at the end of the message when somebody could squeeze one in between the pastor's end of the message and his ending prayer. And those folks would usually speak in the same cadence of foreign words. I'm not mocking anybody. I'm just reporting.
Speaker 1:I'm reading the box score. It'd be like saying, you know, I've watched this same baseball team lose 10 in a row. Let's go through the box score. Well, you're mocking them. No.
Speaker 1:I'm not. I'm saying this guy is o for 20 in his last 10 at bats. I'm not mocking him. I'm just saying this is the predictability of what he's done. Maybe something should change.
Speaker 1:And us little boys sitting in church, we didn't have kids church back then. I don't know why we still kept coming. Imagine that having kids sit in church. I could pretty much tell what Sister Webb was going to say in tongues because it was the same, it was almost verbatim every week. And maybe the interpretation was accurate.
Speaker 1:Yea, my people, I'm coming soon. Get ready. There's not a whole lot of ways you can say, hey, what does go get me a pail of fish mean? Every week it's going to be the same. I don't know what ba ba ba means, but I hear that a lot when we travel in Africa or Brazil.
Speaker 1:So that was a message in tongues. And the interpretation was whatever somebody else, or the pastor if nobody was there, would say, and I'm not discounting that. But is that really what speaking in tongues and interpretation is? I would much rather hear what the stewards put together with people praying not only here in our house, but in other locations where the presbytery teams live across this nation. I would much rather hear these words because these are fresh indications of what the Holy Spirit is saying.
Speaker 1:That is hermeneia. That is. And, you know, one of the beautiful things is when I spoke about these lights, the first word came from an intercessor in Florida. Second word came from someone in Central Texas who wasn't even here. The third word came from somebody who was praying here in our sanctuary.
Speaker 1:God was saying the same thing, and it wasn't a rote missive that we sent out beforehand. Now how does the Holy Spirit do that? Well, we do First Saturday prayer times, and people around the world are praying or around the world are praying. It always amazes me to see somebody in Africa, somebody in France, somebody in Southwest Texas, somebody in Arizona, somebody here saying a very similar thing, almost verbatim sometime. The Holy Spirit can do that.
Speaker 1:And when that happens, as the old preacher said, believe you me, I'm gonna pay attention. Now back in 1912, they didn't have the Internet. It's probably what saved the movement. In 1912 they didn't have, you know, they put their doctrines together and I was there, I read the documents, I took courses that studied about the formation of that movement. There were many different denominations that were contributing.
Speaker 1:People who were receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit, who received the left foot of fellowship from their parent denomination, from the Methodists, from the established ecclesiastical movements, and so on. There were many people contributing, but there wasn't a standard doctrinal viewpoint. So they borrowed a lot, I would say plagiarized, but it wasn't plagiarism. They acknowledged a lot of the doctrine from the Christian Missionary Alliance, from A. B.
Speaker 1:Simpson. It's a matter of fact. And he was a great scholar. A lot of the things about the end time, about the rapture, were directly borrowed from the Baptists who incidentally were saying that the Holy Spirit in the move of the tongues was a last burst of hell. Those were literal, commentaries.
Speaker 1:So you set something in stone, and a lot of the people that were being touched by the Spirit had no formal education. They had no deeper understanding of the Scriptures. Any Bible colleges that were there were already turning toward a hardened ministerial professionalism type of flow, which is why when I was a kid, we would talk about cemeteries and seminaries in the same poetic descriptive. Then you'd say we have it all. We have the second work of grace.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? That was a manufactured word, which meant, okay. We were born again, which is totally a miscast of what the fuller meaning of grace is. Yes, grace was involved. We're saved by grace.
Speaker 1:We're saved by faith. We're saved by hope. What do those four words mean in the scripture? Well, let's just put them all together in the denominational blender, and let's just say they all mean the same thing. Righteousness and justification, yes, that just means the same thing.
Speaker 1:Just if I have ever sinned. You're gonna get a big dose of fresh revelation in two weeks about righteousness, so just get ready. It's been hidden, but it's right there in the word, and we better know what it means because Jesus is coming as a righteous judge. And if you imagine that. Why would Jesus with a sword of flame coming out of his mouth, riding a white horse, leading saints who are going deeper into the things of the spirit with him, why would he come and war on behalf of justify have never sinned?
Speaker 1:That makes no sense, no how, as Delmar O'Donnell said. So it's interesting. It's interesting. I appreciate the words that are received from the Holy Spirit. And I looked through the stewards, I'm gonna have to chastise them about this.
Speaker 1:They were raised better than this. I didn't see one word that said, Yay, my people, I'm coming soon. I didn't see one of those. How dare you eliminate that? I'm just joking.
Speaker 1:I'm just joking. You know, it was always great to say, yay my people, woo hoo, I'm coming soon, because that kind of and we do believe in the second coming of Jesus. We do look for his return. We cherish his promise. But when that is your standard of living your life and that's all you're doing, and you just say, I want to be ready when he comes, that mentality to a large degree puts everything on hold until that happens.
Speaker 1:And you think then that Jesus has done everything he's going to do. He's sitting. He's not going to do anything else until God says, come and bring my people home. I've heard that preached, haven't you? That kind of eliminates you from any real responsibility to do anything because God's gonna do whatever he's gonna do.
Speaker 1:We don't understand what it's gonna be, so we're just waiting. You know, I've told you before that at one point I was blessed to be able to work in a steel mill in Pittsburgh during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. And that meant that I was earning union wages and I was filling in for union guys who were taking their thirteen weeks vacation during the summer. So my point is that many times on the midnight to eight shift, the foreman would come at the beginning and he would say, Okay guys, because it wasn't just rookies, there were a lot of seasoned men or guys who had not worked long enough to take the whole summer off. He'd say, all right, we've met our quota, we're not going do any other work, so find a place to rest.
Speaker 1:You can cook. You can do whatever you want, but if this guy or this guy, which were foremen of the mill, if they come by on a spot inspection, you guys better have somebody watching, and you better hop to it and act like you're working. That happened about once a week, and we all understood that. I think the church operates that way. Okay, Jesus has done everything he's gonna do, but we don't know when he's coming.
Speaker 1:So we're not gonna do anything until that time, and you better be ready. I'd never thought about that before, but it's true. And, you know, a lot of the sermons we heard preached was, you know, the Lord could come at any time. Are you ready? And then you'd have an altar call.
Speaker 1:And the prescribed organ and piano would go into their routine and play while everybody came up and knelt and made sure they were ready if Jesus came. That's great. That's great. But that that whole process is so below what God wants to do. I often wondered at that mill, what would have happened if people weren't working for quotas, and I know supply and demand, I understand that, but what would happen if that mill was actually functional for more than half a day?
Speaker 1:Now why were they doing the midnight to eight shift? This is off topic. Well, you don't just flip a switch at a steel mill, at least back then. You had blast furnaces that had to stay functional. You had to keep that equipment moving, or you couldn't just turn it back on.
Speaker 1:You're looking for a breakdown. You keep had everything functioning because if you didn't, you could damage millions upon millions of dollars of equipment and it would take a herculean task to get it up and running again when you were needing to do things. One time I had the privilege for like three weeks that summer to supervise a strategic part of the plant that made bulletproof metal. And during those weeks we were producing metal for, they didn't tell us which government, it was a foreign government that was allied with us, for some of their battlefield armaments. And so during the day when I had this shift, we were regularly pumping stuff out.
Speaker 1:But at night, that midnight shift, we would do maybe one or two big sheets and we would position it every three hours just to keep the equipment functioning in the process rolling. I understand that, but you know what? The Lord is busy. The heavens are busy. God is looking for people who will partner with him all the time.
Speaker 1:There is no time where heaven is stopping. What about those thirty minutes of silence in heaven? Well, we only have an indication that that happened once. And I told you that I did several streams of study about this beyond my own head or my calculator, and in the day of the Lord is a thousand years, that thirty minutes equals like twenty one years, roughly. And I think that it's a time frame.
Speaker 1:And the silence, the Segeo up there, was God during that time frame bringing about fulfillment of things that had been said, things that he had prophesied that people needed to remember and apply. Because, you know, like the was used throughout the New Testament when Jesus would speak to his disciples about that type of thing. We may be in that time frame. I'm not saying we are. I think we are, but I'm not putting that forward as a word.
Speaker 1:But God is moving, we need to be working. The night is coming and I just, Pentecostal since 1912, what a statement. Oh Jesus, help us. Okay, so we want to talk about a couple of things. You wondered if I was ever going get around to a message, right?
Speaker 1:He ain't preaching, he's just talking. My dad would say that every now and then when we were driving on our way back home from church, and what he meant was nobody was yelling during the message at that point. Preacher wasn't shouting at people or telling them all the things they should be doing. Maybe he was trying to teach them something, which for my dad was that he's just talking. I understood what my dad meant, but I'm sure that I'm sure that he would say that I'm just talking most of the time.
Speaker 1:I've been really praying about this month of August that has just concluded, and it's been a unique month in God's timetable. Lots of things have happened. I'm not going to give a travelogue of all the things that have happened, but there there have been quite a number of counter attacks of the enemy. And during a time where we have been recuperating from a series of dynamic ministries around the world. We were getting ready to to process what God had done, go back through with the indigenous pastors in various parts of the world to begin to prepare for this seminar gathering that's two weeks from now.
Speaker 1:And there have been a lot of challenges that people have faced. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers out of them all, and I'm believing that this is happening. But one of the things that has become somewhat of a trademark for the Saints is this business of, in spiritual warfare and in practical application, rainfall. We've studied about the former and the latter rain, we've studied about the rainforests and how rain actually produces the seasons, we've studied about a lot of those things from the scripture based upon scientific discoveries that have been happening in a lot of different universities around the world, and it's been revelatory. But we get back here to Dallas, and there in the month of August we have had 100 degree plus weather over and over and over again, and when the month of August ended, Katie sent this to me, my daughter, she found a meteorological assessment that there was no traceable rain here in the entire month of August, and that had not happened since 1898.
Speaker 1:Now, a couple of weeks ago, or was it last week, I testified on this broadcast of having awakened in the morning asking God, what do we do about this? Because I know this was an enemy counter attack. We fought this before. This happened several times during the first years I was here in the eighties, and finally God gave us the ability to come before him and recognize that this is a demonic stratagem and we needed to lay claim to rain and what had been year after year drought in Texas, drought in Texas, went away. Now again, some of you listening for the first time, I'm not going to go back through our histories, but over the past decades we've seen this efficacy not only here but around the world where God broke challenging weather events because it's his word.
Speaker 1:I know that France has suffered, Europe has suffered, this summer, but no rain. Couple of weeks ago or last week, I I lose track of time. I had been praying since like 03:30 that morning about this thing. What do we do, Lord? Can I take a stand?
Speaker 1:Can we mobilize our people to pray? And God was just basically saying, no, don't do this. I'm allowing this. Sometimes God allows the enemy to overstep his bounds, and there will be a sevenfold return. We're gonna pray about that this Friday, the sevenfold return.
Speaker 1:And I came, I drove in and I knew, okay, I don't like this. I don't like this heat, I love the rain, and I don't like the enemy being given an advantage to press, but God does things. And so when I was coming to the church, I was driving in, clear skies, forecast of a 104 that day, another Texas scorcher, all of a sudden out of the sunny sky, rain starts falling. And I'm driving up Abrams Road just giving thanks to the Lord. I pulled up under the tree on Abram's Road where is a coveted parking spot.
Speaker 1:Many of you, I let you have it on Sunday, but most days I'll go during the week and park there. It starts pouring down rain, and it rained hard for about ten minutes and it was bright sunshine. It was the strangest thing and I just sat there in the car rejoicing, giving thanks to the Lord because I knew it was his sign that he was still in control, he can do whatever he wants to do, he's not forgotten the righteous, he's not forgotten us, But this past month has been something that God was watching over. And you know what? First day of September, this tropical storm comes, and it's right now blasting the Southeast Coast Of Texas.
Speaker 1:Texas, and it is heading this way at a clip of about five miles an hour. It's a tropical depression, blasting so it's still drawing water from the Gulf Of America. Maybe that's what's wrong. Maybe, maybe the GPS of, of faith hasn't calibrated from the Gulf Of Mexico yet. But I just think it's very interesting that boom, and I'm praying, Lord, you've done this.
Speaker 1:We've not been insisting or binding or loosing or declaring. We're not in drought yet. There haven't been, to my knowledge, any restrictions on us, which is also great. Two things in Texas weather patterns that always are headline news. There are actually three things in Texas are headline news.
Speaker 1:Number one is if the Dallas Cowboys are playing. That takes precedent. If Jesus returns on a Sunday that the Dallas Cowboys are playing, it's going to be arguable which is going to be the main headline in the Dallas Morning News. The second thing is drought. If weather forecasters can start talking about drought, it is everything.
Speaker 1:Well, it's the farmers, brother. They just need to know. I know that, but it's a scare headline tactic. The third thing is an ice storm. And if there's a potential of an ice storm in January, they'll start talking about it in late October.
Speaker 1:And it just grips. Oh my goodness, ice storm. Those three things. So I haven't really heard much about drought. God has filled the reservoirs, and it's not like our city, metroplex isn't growing.
Speaker 1:An eighth of California that didn't stop on the way here from Arizona is moving into this state. So there's a lot of demand and since the border has been closed, temporarily probably, You know, all the millions that came up over our border, they're using water, but we've not had water restrictions. And I would know because the neighborhood police would be telling us, hey, you're watering your yard, don't do it. There've been suggestions, only water a couple days a week, but there hasn't been any bans. So God's done that, but this storm coming immediately when September comes is very interesting.
Speaker 1:We didn't ask for it. God said, just trust me. And I did, and that downpour was a gift from God. You know what, I even pulled up the radar on my handy dandy radar app that I pay for, so it's not Aunt Nelly's radar app. And there wasn't any little spot of green, no clouds over.
Speaker 1:God sent that, and he's sending this rain. Well what about those poor people where the flash flooding is? Oh, I hate that. I pray that people paid heed to the warnings and that they'll just rejoice that their lakes and their cattle ponds and their aquifers are being replenished. And all of those man made reservoirs are being refilled because this past month has received nothing.
Speaker 1:I know we need it here and I'm just, I'm not even asking the Lord, I'm just praising him. As I see the trajectory, it's coming right for us. Lord, you know how to restore. So that goes to this issue. Some people think that if you learn a principle, well bless God, in the scripture, you can just apply it at any time.
Speaker 1:You have absolute power. You've learned the tricks. You've learned the lessons. So bless God, you just do it. Well, is not really linear.
Speaker 1:Faith is not based on principles alone. Faith is based on partnership with God. And the passage which I'm finally getting around to referencing from the book of Ecclesiastes, hopefully some of you haven't eliminated the book of Ecclesiastes because Solomon did some bad things. I hope that's not happened. We have a tendency to do that, don't we?
Speaker 1:God gives an anointed thing and then we find out somebody did something that's heinous to us. Then we just say, well, all that stuff God gave, I'm not gonna listen to it anymore. Solomon did some terrible things. He did. But this was an anointed word, and the birds saying this, it's probably in a hymnal somewhere, to everything there is a season, Ecclesiastes three, and a time to every purpose unto heaven.
Speaker 1:And then he goes through this litany, a time to be born, a time to die, we know that. But the times and the seasons, which is an Issachar like anointing, we really need to recognize that it's not just forecasting. That's important. But it's partnership with God. There are times where God is saying, do this, and then we want to do something further, and he says, no, not yet.
Speaker 1:Oh please, pretty please, I know the principles. I've got 50 people praying and declaring and fasting, will you do it? It's not God's time. And part of the, the arsenal of the saints in the end time is to learn to submit yourself to God's timing. Daniel says the saints of the kingdom are gonna possess the kingdom, and then God's gonna allow them to be overcome.
Speaker 1:And then they'll possess the kingdom, and God's gonna allow them to overcome. There are a lot of those kinds of passages that in fairness we don't like as humans, But it's there in the word anyway. So I recognize that is many times around the world that we've seen God break drought supernaturally, send rain. You know, in February, we were in Brazil in in the coast of Rio De Janeiro state, and God sent that 12 to 14 inches of rain in twenty four hours. It was a miraculous sign.
Speaker 1:It scared the people who lived in that state. And God released his presence in a dynamic way. What a thing. And all of us were saved. I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 1:You're send that much rain in a quasi third world country, who don't have the benefits of what we enjoy here in The US. They they could have been some disastrous things, but God did it. And then that meteorological depiction of the big hand that was over that area from the satellite view, that was amazing. We've seen that happen in Africa, in India. We've seen it happen in Europe.
Speaker 1:We've seen it happen here. Over and over again, God does that kind of thing. Does it mean like we can be Tim the Enchanter and go out with our rod and declare things and boom, here it comes? Sometimes God gives that discretionary authority, but that's rare in the scripture. So knowing the principles and having an anointing and having an empowerment are all wonderful, but they are subject to the timing of the Lord and to everything.
Speaker 1:How many things? Everything. Well, no. Just wait a second, brother. Read that again.
Speaker 1:What does everything mean? Well, everything means everything. I'm sure it meant that 1912. We've been Pentecost Pentecostal since then, know. In everything, in everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose that God is indicating.
Speaker 1:I think I'm we've We've just been in a season. I feel, this is my opinion, that we're emerging from it and I believe that there is a release of the presence of God. I think it's obvious. Now here's where you can read the box score. Over throughout this year, we've had victory after victory after victory.
Speaker 1:We've seen God move in dynamic ways in many different countries. We have we have watched God work miraculous things in cities all across continents. We've had teams go and come back, teams go and come back. We've had a win streak, as it were. And in a time where we came back and we could look at the calendar and we say, okay, we just need to give thanks, we need to rejoice, we need to gain rest and measures of recuperation with an eye toward what's coming in September and then immediately other trips and other missions.
Speaker 1:While missions are going on, you know, one of the wonderful teachers in Brazil this past Saturday had a gathering with I don't know how many pastors. I know that group, I think they have a constituency of 100 pastors. I don't know how many were at this meeting, but this precious saint taught on the fivefold mind of Christ. And she asked, how many of you pastors have ever heard anything like this teaching and none of them had heard it. This is happening.
Speaker 1:There are things that are happening even now throughout the world. But for us, this has seemingly been a time of a lot of testing, a lot of things we don't understand, a lot of ways that we've been asked to stand when everything around us is cratering. And I believe that God, in his mercy and in his power, is watching. Do you believe that? When things don't go our way or something happens that we don't understand, the initial human reaction is to raise our fist in God.
Speaker 1:What good has it done for me to serve you? How could you let something happen like this? I just don't understand. And then those who who just function on principles alone are standing off to the corner saying, well, they didn't manage this well. If they had just done this, this wouldn't have happened.
Speaker 1:Get real. I pray for you kind of folks. I really do that God would turn the light on. You're not gonna get very far with taking your book of principles and standing boldly before the throne of grace and lecturing God on how you think he failed you. That's gonna get you into a peck of trouble with the almighty.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's the type of clientele that the Lord prophesied about the time of the end where they'll gather before the Lord and they'll say, hey, we worked miracles. We applied your principles. We cast out devils. We healed the sick. We prophesied, we did all these things.
Speaker 1:And God said, go away from me kid, you bother me. No, depart from me you worker of iniquity, I did not know you. Never knew you? Well, that's what God says. Know he knows about them, he knows everything.
Speaker 1:But knowing God means that you are partnering with him and you are submitting yourself to the understanding that he is in control. You aren't. There's a way that seems right to us. The end is destruction. We don't lean to our own understanding.
Speaker 1:In all our ways, we acknowledge Him. You know, he works everything for the good. Many are the afflictions the Lord delivers when the enemy comes in. Like a flood, the Lord will raise up a standard. Not if the enemy comes in, not, oh, you declared it, so here he comes, not we saw him coming, we seen him coming, so we sent scud missiles of faith and we just stopped him.
Speaker 1:No. That's not what the scripture says in Isaiah. When sometimes the Lord lets the enemy maneuver knowing that he's gonna flee in seven ways. The New Testament says if the princesses of this world had known, they would have not crucified the Lord of glory. Interesting, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Now I am not welcoming. I bind the enemy. I plead the blood of Jesus over words that I'm saying here. I am not welcoming the enemy to do anything. Well, I don't know why this happened to me if pastor hadn't preached on that.
Speaker 1:I'm not welcoming. We're submitted to our Lord. He is watching over us, and I know that even if there are those of you, and I know there are many, who have suffered for righteousness sake, we grieve over the pains that so many of our saints have suffered in these past weeks, and I mean that sincerely. It's cut us to the core, and I have questions. God doesn't care about my questions.
Speaker 1:Hope you know that. His hand is covering us. We'll understand it better by and by. Joy will come in the morning. And I I know I know absolutely that God is, God is here, and I know that he's watching over you, and I know beyond any shadow of doubt that he's turning the tide.
Speaker 1:And again, this Friday, our devotional, Friday devotional, we're gonna be encouraging you to submit yourself before the Lord and begin to listen, not demand, but to listen for the rumblings of that sevenfold fleeing that the enemy is gonna be making. The blessings that God is releasing to us as you've stood faithful against insurmountable attacks. Why are you being attacked? Why did the enemy come? Because you have been standing for the Lord.
Speaker 1:Well, that just tells you why we shouldn't be engaging in spiritual warfare. There are books out there about that. God is faithful. God is faithful. He is with you.
Speaker 1:His eyes are always upon the righteous. And I'm telling you, just like this storm is approaching Dallas, God is sending an overwhelming, pressed down, shaken together, running over blessing upon your life and upon this remnant of Saints that he's using to raise up people around the world to do his bidding. Thank you for letting me ramble like this. God bless you. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Don't forget to register online on the website for our seminar. Don't forget to tune in for the Friday devotional. Don't forget first Saturday prayer, and we'll look forward to being with you on mass on Sunday, from right here at the Father's Church. God bless, and goodbye.