Committed To Old Values With A New Vision

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the YouTube recording's caption track, read through the transcript panel — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Because of the Times 1993 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: The Church · Missions and Evangelism · Second Coming

Anthony Mangun — pastor of the host church, preaching the conference in his own pulpit — opens mid-illustration, with Archimedes' boast that given a place to stand he would move the earth, and turns it on the church of the twentieth century, a few years shy of the twenty-first. Enormous changes are sweeping government, public attitude, and opportunity; the handwriting, he says, is on the wall for the Church of the Living God, and the church in this day can no more stand still than General Motors or the armed forces or the sun refusing to shine. There must be progress, or there will be death. What follows is his 1992 stock-taking preached aloud: a young pastor who shut everything down but his family and his church, re-examined what he believed, and came back with old values — and a new vision.

The mandate and the open door.

The command of God is a divine imperative, and he locates it expressly: Matthew 28:19 is the mandate for the church — go, teach, preach, baptize — the marching orders and credentials of the book-of-Acts church, not rescinded, still in place in 1993. To settle for anything less than the full measure of that directive is colossal folly, for the church will never be static. This generation's opportunity is golden: if the century's first decade needed the outpourings at Azusa Street and Topeka, its last decade needs one more. He hears the Spirit's word to the churches as an open door no man can shut (the wording sounds here; priced in the packet, not indexed), and Paul's word with it — Paul, who said a great and effectual door was opened to him, and there were many adversaries; the adversaries could not stop him, because the door was open. Against that stands the warning to Sardis, whose name said alive while she was dead (priced in the packet). The church is not to be archaic, obsolete, or antiquated: growth produces change, and when growth ceases — in an individual, a church, an organization — death is imminent.

Scriptures: Matthew 28:19; 1 Corinthians 16:9

Contend for the faith — and deliver it.

This year his own church felt the shake: their base closed and twenty-five of the finest families walked out to different places in America and around the world. Two couples from his church won a family to the Lord elsewhere — baptized in Jesus' name, filled with the Holy Ghost — and that pastor thanked them and asked them not to bring anybody else: we have all we need. If that becomes our mentality, he says, Ichabod will be written on us. Then he takes up the book of Jude, and argues its placement: the translators put Jude right before Revelation, and there is a reason — in that book is the charge to earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. But there is more to the verse than contending: it was *delivered*, and it has to be delivered on. The faith is a living body of truth that the saints of each epoch hand to the generation present. I don't care how strong you say you believe Acts 2:38, he tells the preachers — if you don't have a desire to deliver it, you don't believe it (Acts 2:38 sounds twice in this movement as the name of the doctrine, never as a text read; the packet prices it as a label). Emerson said it: your actions speak so loudly I can't hear what you're saying. Our churches will tell how much we believe it.

Scriptures: Jude 3

The foundation stands sure.

Don't let anything shake you from the faith. Paul's second letter to Thessalonica sounds at length: those who perish do so because they received not the love of the truth, and God himself sends strong delusion to those who believed not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. Paul writing to Timothy sounds with it: evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived — but continue thou in the things thou hast learned, knowing of whom thou hast learned them. And then the foundation texts, voiced in one sequence: nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal — the Lord knoweth them that are his, and let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity; for other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Truth will have earthquakes around it, he says, but there will never be a truth quake: truth doesn't change. What this week needs is leaders — pastors, evangelists, apostles, prophets, teachers, superintendents — anointed, sensitive leadership with apostolic vision. The church begun on the day of Pentecost is the most powerful entity on planet earth, and what its churches need is not greater preachers or singers or charisma but the demonstration and operation of the Holy Ghost: let the Holy Ghost take our churches back over.

Scriptures: 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12; 2 Timothy 3:13-14; 2 Timothy 2:19; 1 Corinthians 3:11

The boy who lived.

Thank God for our standards, he says — but what if we preached separation with a church so powerful in town that blind eyes open, wheelchairs empty, and people are set free? Then he tells it. A Baptist man in the congregation — baptized in Jesus' name, filled with the Holy Ghost, attending the church — called him the previous January: his son had been shot between the eyes with a .22 magnum, and was not going to live. At the hospital the father took his arm: you have taught me that I can know this book and pray this book, and God will do it. The doctors told the father plainly that the boy would not live, and raised the chance for him to live on in seven other people. The father thanked them — and asked for two days on life support first: we want to activate our hotline; we want to pray. The next morning there was a brainwave. Surgeries followed, over weeks, the doctors still saying he won't make it — while you're operating, the father said, I'll be in there praying. The boy woke from the coma. The doctors had said he would never talk and never walk; the father stood and claimed in the name of Jesus that his boy was going to talk and his boy was going to walk. One year later, the boy is talking and walking. (No one in this story is named in the summary: the boy is never named in the telling itself, and his father's and doctor's names are carried on the packet's face only, packet.md.)

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The church that cannot be stopped — revival or funeral.

With the voice of prophecy, he says: there are no impossibilities with the church, no incurables, no unsavables. Empires fill the graveyard — Rome with her legions became a dishonorable, fruitless branch; Greece a moldy crust in history's garbage can; Egypt a shabby substance of splendid tombs; Spain a drowsy beggar watching a broken clock — but the Church of the Living God cannot be spoken of the same: no persecution, system, smear, apostasy, skeptic, or rebel has stopped it; it just keeps on marching, and the gates-of-hell wording sounds three times across the passage (priced in the packet, not indexed). God has not gone bankrupt; the vaults of heaven are not empty. Washington has its memorials to Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson — but in every metropolitan area of America there ought to be a monument superseding them all: a Church of the Living God. Instead, many churches tonight teeter between ineffectiveness and extinction. So his verdict on the year: for a lot of our churches it's either going to be a revival or a funeral in 1993, because the church cannot stand still. That is why, in 1992, he shut everything down in his life except his family and this church — no campaigns that summer, a first vacation with his family — and took an account of his own preaching: Anthony, every time you get up you're on evangelism; let's see what you actually believe. He paused, and committed to some old values. And what he thought he was going to preach as old values was not what they turned out to be.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Old values: Calvary, eternity, heaven.

The first old value is a place called Calvary. No man should ever be the same after seeing the cross — whether by sermon, song, or drama, the cause of the cross needs to grip our hearts anew. He wishes it could be said of his ministry that the man has had a fresh touch of the cross upon his life; instead he can tell, in his own life and among them, that they haven't been to the cross lately — attitudes maladjusted, loose tongues slaying six-foot men, disrespect he has never seen in the movement. You came here bitter tonight: find the cross. Judgmental: find the cross. Pharisees with black suits and black hearts: you need the cross too. The second value is eternity: time is not going to be here very long, and that thought overwhelms him. One malignant cell can change the whole course of a life — he names a man present whose forty-two-year-old daughter Sharon has cancer (an adult, named in the telling as she is named here), and Kenneth Brady, the lead man on his trustee board, who learned of his own malignancy and whom he buried — one of the greatest men that ever walked in shoe leather. Don't let me live for down here, he prayed. The third is heaven: there is a city that lieth foursquare, walls of jasper, gates of pearl, no more sorrow, sickness, or pain, its twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles — don't get away from the apostles' doctrine; that's the foundation of heaven (the city description is his narration; priced in the packet). He wakes every morning singing about the sweet by and by.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The judgment seat, and he's coming.

Walking through heaven in his prayer, he came to the throne — the judgment seat of Christ — and everything began to roll in front of him: the gospel, his possessions, his wasted talents. It was as if God spoke: you're not standing here as pastor of the Pentecostals of Alexandria; you're not standing here as a great man's son; Anthony, you're just here — an ordinary Christian. What have you done for me? That, he says, must be why our tears are wiped away: when we realize what we could have done and didn't. And one more old value grabbed him: he's coming. Half the preachers in the room, if asked, couldn't raise a hand for when they last preached the soon coming of the Lord — but sinfulness, prayerlessness, lukewarmness, indifference, and carnality would leave our congregations if we got them believing in the imminent, close return of Jesus Christ. He recalls the "88 reasons" season of 1988 — he preached against it, not for it — and the people who flooded church that year who hadn't been since '68. What would happen if the church lived as if he died yesterday, arose today, and was coming tomorrow? His mother used to sing of it, and move him every time. As a nine-year-old he would go home pleading about what he felt — it was a fear that the Lord was coming that kept him as a kid saved (his own childhood, told by himself). The last sure word he read in the book for this movement: occupy till I come (the wording sounds here; priced in the packet).

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Hell.

And last, the value he closes on: I don't want to go to hell. When's the last time you preached on it? Nobody will be in heaven saying mama made me come — you have to make reservations to go to heaven; all a man has to do to go to hell is die. Here he tells on his own house: his wife Mickey was driving their young son Gentry — five years old — when the boy, making a right turn with her, asked where in the hell she was going. She brought him home, and Mangun did what his mother had done to him: Ivory soap in the mouth, and he was never to say that word again. The next Sunday night Mangun preached on hell, and on the way home the boy said: mama, I can't say, I can't say — I can't say what dad preached on. (His own son, in his own telling — his wife and he the parents; the packet records the name's caption settlement.) Hell, he preaches, is nothing but the eternal wrath of God: judgment has been seen in limited measure — Hurricane Andrew swept south Florida for twenty-nine minutes; the 1989 earthquake shook San Francisco for thirty-seven seconds — that's what I can do, God says, when I decide to bring judgment. His generation wasn't raised, as he was, on preaching like the death-march sermon he heard as a boy, when a preacher of his father's generation marched and marched — hell, to hell, to hell — until the kid ran and cried out to God: I don't want to go to such a place. Hell is still a place where prayers are prayed and will not be answered, whose only friends are demons and fallen angels; it has no exits — give me a drink of water; there is no water down here; give me a little air; there is no air; then let me die; you can't die down here. A hundred died in the last minute, six thousand will die in the next hour, 144,000 today — where will they spend eternity? He recalls a woman preacher, Tecla Marian, who stood in this same pulpit under the anointing: her baby was ripped from her hands and thrown out a window and died, and she said her people do not cry about persecution, because that's passing — we cry about the lostness of mankind; we don't weep over our babies being thrown out windows; we weep over people who will never have a chance again (her baby is unnamed in the telling, and unnamed here).

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Jerry, the converts, and the prayer.

There was a motorcycle gang member — where are you, Jerry; come here, Jerry. The man stands before them bearded, once messed up on drugs and headed to blow his brains out; the church didn't really respond to him because he was wild when he came, but Mangun felt like investing in a soul. Now Jerry's own voice sounds in the sermon (his words, not Mangun's — the packet carries the settlement): he came out of a pit of hell, he knew "Jesus loves me" from when he was a little boy, and now he's working in a mission reaching for souls who don't even know about the ark, who don't know that God loves them — and he loves them. Then Mangun turns to the new converts brought in off the streets, men who don't look too hot, cocaine addicts out of Hell's Kitchen moving into the grace house: look at me — the Lord can change your life; he can put you in water and baptize you in the name of Jesus, and every sin you've ever committed can be forgiven; you can be saved tonight. Some don't like them because of the color of their skin — but they got a soul. We will have a new vision, and we will love one another, when we look back at some old truths in this book: the coming of the Lord, heaven and hell, the judgment seat of Christ. And he brings the house down to prayer: kneel, sit, stand where you can — there ought to be some repenting in this place right now.

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Matthew 28:19 · 1 Corinthians 16:9 · Jude 3 · 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 · 2 Timothy 3:13-14 · 2 Timothy 2:19 · 1 Corinthians 3:11

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)