Transcript of a published conference session by David Fuller, transcribed from YouTube. An attributed primary source — not Acts 2:38 Life doctrine text.
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Summary
Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.
Traveling light — and the bones of Joseph
- He thanks the gracious saints of the Pentecostals of Alexandria for their hosting, and opens on journeys: "the secret to every successful trip journey or pioneering effort is that you must travel light" — half the discomforts, worry and frustrations of new ventures are "dealing with the excess baggage that you thought you could not do without." The pioneers who left the eastern shores for the Kansas prairie, the Colorado mountains and the deserts of Nevada and California could not part with treasured family heirlooms; the wagons went out overladen, until the sterner considerations of water and provision and protection left the heirlooms bleached and ruined along the trail.
- Then the counterweight: "Moses took the bones of Joseph with him" — a coffin of bones carried on a wilderness march through a burning desert and a wandering wasteland. There is no explanation for it: either an unfortunate act of idealism, sentimentalism and attachment to the past, or a thing "pregnant with truth and powerful for instruction to our generation." So Fuller examines the baggage of Pentecost we carry from the past into the complexities of the '90s — heirlooms challenged at the custom houses of higher thought as the church enters the new frontier of an end-time era — asking what their value and utility will be, since nothing that has no purpose no longer has value.
Things that should not be forgotten
- He has stood in Arlington Cemetery — heart palpitating, spirit lifted, patriotism vibrating — watching the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, and no one imagines a Russian bear or a Chinese dragon breaching the Atlantic to steal those unknown bones away. Why such pomp, why such circumstance, why such reverent feeling over a tomb of bones that are unknown? "Because there are things that should not be forgotten; there are sacrifices made that should not be abandoned; there are territories won that should not be given back."
Preserving the dedicated things
- It was that spirit that drove David, in the setting of his kingdom and the appointing of his officers, to set a treasurer over the dedicated things in the house of the Lord, so that every victory would bring its spoil, and every measure of courage and every tear and blood and sweat ventured in the cause of Jerusalem would not be lost and not be forgotten. Generations later a despotic woman ascended the throne and loosed assassins into the house of God to destroy the royal seed; but because of David's foresight there was in the house of the priests a woman of vision, passion and insight who stole into the palace and stole out the king's son, leaving unbroken the chain of blood from Judah that would point to the Redeemer.
- Because of the times there is a treasury of dedicated things, and he hears men rising to this pulpit pulling off the wall the swords and spears and shields of past battles, coming with fresh vision and fresh voice — and fresh victories — to the challenges of the '90s.
The relay of faith — David's charge to Solomon
- The church he pastors will survive him: its ministry is more enduring, more important and of greater consequence than his personal input into the kingdom, so what it inherits for leadership is in his hands. Should he mentor someone who understands the timeless, non-generational aspect of the church's ministry, or sentence it to a leadership that does not understand and must relearn and adapt itself to a self-centred, selfish ministry? "The Church of God cannot be held hostage to a selfish self-centered generation of ministry" — the church has a call and a purpose that preceded us and will likewise follow us. Generations removed from its birth, will the church be as the Rechabites, continuing the allegiance to apostolic truth, or as the Pharisees and Sadducees of the day of Jesus, seeing an evolution of truth that conforms to the culture and ideology around it?
- His located text is the transition itself: "in first Kings chapter 2 the first four verses of Scripture we see a transition of generations" — David placing into the hand of Solomon the sacred leadership of God's people and of God's purposes in the earth, and giving him very careful and stern reminders and warnings of the things that had been mediated to him and handed to him in a relay.
- For there is a way to give truth and a way to receive truth, and he figures it by the relay race, run in a very scientific and definite manner: the slowest man on the team runs first, the baton always in his right hand; at the end of his responsibility he passes it to the next man, who receives it with a trailing left hand in full stride, turns it immediately to his right hand, and carries it to his determined point, until it is placed in the hand of the fastest man who carries it across the finish line. In the zone of transition the man giving up the baton is in full stride and the man receiving it is in full stride — no slowing, no acceleration, no lost fractions of seconds — because it is in the changing of the baton where the race is won and lost. "We cannot afford to let one generation die before the next generation rises in full stride" to the visions and purposes of the apostolic message, and this generation cannot wait for the young to get to their thirties and forties before making significant contributions: they must now receive with meekness the engrafted word.
Scriptures: 1 Kings 2:1-4
The hive — and the institutional disease
- In the average bee colony there are sixty thousand bees, and everything is delineated, defined and divided by the balance of the hive and the future of the hive. Sentinels stand on the hive with twelve hundred scent organs in each antenna, protecting it against any danger or encroachment from outside — "let's not be too quick to silence the voice who detects spirits among us and sound the warning," for they prefer the protection of the whole hive. Workers in wax continually repair the hive and keep it renewed; workers in honey constantly see that the young are fed — the honey placed at each cell, the egg placed by the queen, the larva hatching and feeding on that food.
- And there are foragers, with such special sensitivities to things no one else in the hive has — a pioneering spirit, a reaching-out spirit. A forager that has found a new resource lands on the hive and dances: in a circle, he is telling the hive the honey is less than a hundred yards away; in a figure eight, that it is beyond the hundred yards — and how fast he wiggles his tail tells them proportionally how far it is; landing vertical or away from vertical, he gives the direction geometrically against the sun. The communication is critically important to the balance of the hive: take more honey for the trip than the forage needs and the balance is not maintained; communicate inaccurately and another bee may take too little and die before returning. And the forager confirms his find by giving the others a little taste of the nectar, so they know when they get there what it will taste like: it is more important than telling truth — there must be a giving of a taste of what miracles and prayer and revival and sacrifice and dedication and consecration are.
- Against that order stands the disease a house can breed. An article in Science Digest, taken from the New England Journal of Medicine, told of the diseases indigenous to a hospital building — the staph infections that are just in that hospital: five percent of the people admitted are cured of the things they bring with them, but pick up one of these infections, and five percent of them die, healed of other things but killed by another malady; and the further class, where a surgeon in a moment of tenseness or inattention in the operating room inflicts damage that should not have occurred. God began to speak to his heart: are you allowing spirits and diseases to breed within the church, so that people come in and are healed and saved from adulteries and immoralities and dishonesties and drugs, only to be given a disease that is indigenous to the institution, that kills and slays them? "Is that what Jesus meant when he spoke to the Pharisees and said, when you make a convert you make him a twofold child of the devil?" Hearts damaged, minds warped, spirits dwarfed because of the uncaring, inattentive hand of a preacher — and the bigotries and biases and prejudices all ministries have to fight and deal with.
Pure motives — and the incorruptible seed
- When he walked into the prayer room in this building Tuesday morning early, he was met with something he had not felt in a long, long time: a spirit of holiness approached him; he fell at a back bench and began to pray, and could not control the tears as God began to wash him. And he heard the voice of the Lord: it will require a greater degree of purity — "it will require a higher benchmark of pure motive and spirit to affect my purpose in the end time than it ever has." Preachers, it is time to stop taking ourselves too seriously: there is a dimension to this work of God that was before him and, if God carries it, will be after him, and he does not have the right to set up institutional diseases within his church that bend and twist and infect and saturate the spirits and hearts of people.
- For what God said was meant to liberate and set free — what he gave to make men feel love and joy and peace — men have renounced into making them mean and nasty and bitter and cruel and hateful and judgmental. So the question stands over the passing of truth: "how can I pass the incorruptible seed that liveth and abideth forever? How can I commit it to another without tainting it with my spirit, my heart, and my bigotry and my biases and my rebellions, and my personal agendas and motives?"
Scriptures: 1 Peter 1:23
"From the beginning it was not so" — the thesis announced
- "I'm not going to talk about issues tonight; I'm not going to preach my personal feelings and convictions. I'm going to throw a few principles at you and let you and God go home and work it out in your own heart and in your own spirit and in your own mind." Jesus found himself cast into an untenable position between the conservative and liberal theological schools over the family, in the scene portrayed in the nineteenth chapter of the book of Matthew: one school said divorce could be had for every cause — there was by no standard a reason that a man could not be loosed from his wife or a wife loosed from her husband; the other school, far more conservative, answered back to the law of Moses and to the precedents Moses had set in his judgments concerning families in their lives together. And so they asked Jesus: which camp are you in?
- Jesus said, I take neither posture, because both of you are wrong — neither is the posture God intended: "from the beginning it was not so." He took them back to the beginning, and at a point of beginning he established a truth that transcends the argument that was germane to the discussion of Matthew 19: it is not where time and culture has brought you; you must go back to the point, the beginning, and understand the intent of God, and then from there make your adjustments toward the principles God established. "I come tonight to establish a point, a beginning."
Scriptures: Matthew 19
Landmarks — and the integrity of the foundation
- In the original thirteen states — Kentucky and Tennessee among them — property, meets and bounds are determined differently than in the rest of the forty-eight contiguous states: in New England there is a principle monument, and every civil engineer who works on a topographical survey works from it, turning a transit so many degrees, minutes and seconds and measuring so far from that principle monument; you cannot buy or sell a piece of property without a current survey, within the last thirty days, that relates back to a principle point of beginning, with a logarithm applied for the curvature of the earth. In the other states property is divided into subdivisions of square miles — townships and ranges reckoned north, east, south or west from an initial point on a principal meridian — yet its reference is still back to that initial point. "Everything answers back to that principle point": every survey and every plat book in every county courthouse relates its parcel all the way back, unerringly and accurately, to that principal monument and point of beginning.
- Without a defined point of beginning you can never determine a boundary, you cannot lay out a foundation, you cannot construct a building. When this building was built, a civil engineer established the point of beginning on this property in relation to a known monument; the structural engineer turned off from his transit, defined one corner of the building, and constantly turned back, measuring in at least three quadrants in case of an infinitesimal error in any quadrant, to establish the control line on which all the footings and all the column lines would be built. In Atlanta, a structural engineer in his own church was called onto a project when the final fourteenth floor had been set and the fascia wall and glass were going in: as they set the glass on the next story, the windows and glass in the story below would begin to pop out and fall to the ground. He took a transit to the benchmark, measured the elevations at each corner column and found them all within an eighth of an inch of level — but when he finally looked at the column lines, after three days, he found the engineer had eight different control lines he was working from. They had to tear the building back down to the foundation, blast out the anchor bolts, reset the control lines accurately from the point of beginning, and start all over. "We cannot afford to get this far and start tearing the church down."
Christ the benchmark — the altar, and the seed again
- "If you want to go back to the point of beginning, this thing begins and ends in God." It does not begin and end in an organization, or in any personality past, present or future — it starts and finishes in the Lord Jesus Christ. When you go back to the foundation of this world — before there was a star, before there was a universe, before the elephant lumbered across the prairies of Africa — God laid a foundation in a pool of blood: this thing starts with sacrifice and redemption, and to establish the church on any other premise is to start off the wrong control line, until far along in the building project things stop fitting together and start falling out of the building. And where was the point of beginning in the sanctuary? "It was the altar." This thing does not start in the pulpit, it does not start in the choir, it does not start at the keyboard, it does not start in the foyer — it starts right here, in the altar.
- And the seed comes back: Western cattlemen are careful in allowing what seed is passed on in their thoroughbreds, so that only pure bloodlines are passed on; the Word of God is given to us incorruptible, and if it is mediated incorruptible it will produce Christianity — but if he lets the genes and chromosomes of his spiritual bigotry paint the seed, he will start having a different offspring. Then the benchmark: the structural engineer who built their own building drove him insane checking back to points of beginning before every anchor bolt was set and before the concrete was poured — "Brother Fuller, it's got to be right; you don't understand: just a small error in the point of beginning transmits into major, major errors as you transmit it down the building." God did not initiate the benchmark of the Apostolic movement on the unity of the Spirit, but on the fullness of the stature of the man Christ Jesus: the benchmark is Jesus Christ, and he must measure back to him his motives, his doctrine, his spirit, his values and his purpose.
Scriptures: 1 Peter 1:23
Standards — everything answers back to something
- In Greenwich, England, there is the Prime Meridian, from which all the latitude and longitude for the entire mapping of the world is determined and taken, and from which all time is measured — man has arbitrarily put a very crooked line, the International Date Line, out in the Pacific where the day changes, but the Prime Meridian has no curvatures and bends and twists and turns of the caprice and decision of men; it is a line applied mathematically, taking into consideration the curvature of the earth, establishing the zero meridian from where all things are established. So when the Bible talks about landmarks it is not talking about generational prejudices, or cultural ideologies, or a curving, weaving line men have established to say where truth is: landmarks mark two things — they were given for direction, and they are to mark inheritances; to move a landmark is to confuse direction and to encroach on and destroy an inheritance. And he applies it to himself: "I define my marriage not to the cultural tendencies of the '90s but by the principle landmark that he established at the beginning. I define my salvation from what he established at a point of beginning. I understand my sexuality not by the culture that I live in." The president of the Southern Baptist board living next door to him said the theologians have nearly destroyed their movement by delineating over issues between the conservative and moderate — their training centers in Russia will not be theological centers but points of nurturing disciples, because Jesus called disciples, and disciples don't divide in muddy issues like theologians do. Imagine the chaos if men arbitrarily moved the Prime Meridian — maps would mean nothing; the problem with faith in the North American church is that lines are constantly being erased and moved and erased and moved back, while in Asia and Africa there is such a simplicity of staying at the point of beginning, staying founded in a pool of blood.
- For every discipline answers back to some standard that defines a point of beginning in that discipline: every chemist, every mathematician applying his science methodically with tremendous faith in its outcome; the physician, who does not capriciously practise medicine by his own volition but answers back to a very careful, scientific, well-defined point of beginning for diagnosis and the application of cure; even the butcher who weighs your meat. In Washington the Bureau of Standards holds in hermetically sealed rooms — where temperature and atmosphere and humidity cannot tamper with the sacredness of the weights and measures — the standards to which every scale in America answers back, whether it weighs a semi-truck at the side of the highway or a few ounces of baloney for the widow at the counter. "No, brethren, we don't have to answer to the United Pentecostal Church, and no, brethren, we do not have to answer to any man — but we will all stand before him, and we will all answer back to the same standard."
Liberty, loyalty, and balance
- "Autonomy without accountability leads to anarchy." Webster defines anarchy as without governmental authority, as confusion and disorder — but in his New World Dictionary, desktop edition, simply "the absence of a common purpose or standard"; and if there is anything that defines us it could be that absence, because everybody wants to be the landmark off which every transit is turned to establish the point of beginning. The last place he finds the pattern is in the book of Judges: there was unbounded permissiveness and bottomless decadence and depravity, "because every man did that which was right in his own eyes." There is enough flesh in this, and enough in this brain, to damn him and get him off course — he needs the accountability of his organization; he needs to be accountable to brethren — for autonomy without that accountability will lead him and leave him absent from a common purpose and a common standard.
- Against that stands Paul's word to the Corinthian church, voiced at length: "therefore let no man glory in man, for all things are yours — whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to come — all things are yours." No man can ever deny him what Jesus Christ has given him the liberty to have, and no man can ever be his point of reference and point of beginning. But the desire to be free roots in all our hearts — the overwhelming passion to do as we please: a child resists restraint; he himself was raised in a home with a prohibitive code of ethics and rules, where "don't" was the word he heard most all his life, and broken away he snapped the bondage of codes and rules to express himself. Patrick Henry's cry for an America humiliated and enslaved to England was "give me liberty or give me death" — a strange dichotomy, because often he gets both: "I get my liberty, and because I mismanage it — because I do not understand that my liberty is predicated on a point of beginning — I take the liberty of God and I turn it to lasciviousness, and I self-destruct; I pollute my own temple; I destroy my own soul." What mandates and governs and sets boundaries to liberty is loyalty — allegiance to a principle monument he must answer back to: "I belong to him. Liberty without loyalty ruins us. Liberty without loyalty destroys us."
Scriptures: Judges 21:25; 1 Corinthians 3:21-23
Tolerance — and the closing charge at the beginning
- Somewhere there must be tolerance. No automotive engineer has ever laid out a combustion engine without designing tolerances at its specific points of stress — places of heat, of motion, of energy and of power, and points of transmission — for if the tolerances are not built in, when the ignition is turned and the spark hits and the gas is exploded in the piston, the engine self-destructs. God designed the human body with the same wisdom: the norm of the cardiovascular system is 120 over 80, yet in times of emotional and physical stress the body's tolerance lets the blood pressure fluctuate well beyond that high, even almost to a stroke point, without residual or long-term damage. The pancreas creates insulin and keeps the blood sugar — the fuel the cells are driven on — at its established norm, with fluctuations high and low between meals and fastings and after gorging, but not with the breadth of fluctuation blood pressure has. And in the thyroid there is thyroxine, a tiny enzyme that sets the metabolism level of the body, never more of it in the body than what rests basically on a pinhead: an infinitesimal too much fires up the engine too hard and will send the body into trauma, and you will die; an infinitesimal too little works chemically in the brain, and dementia and insanity can occur. So it is in the church: some things are like blood pressure, with a whole lot of tolerance, and the United Pentecostal Church can adhere to a common purpose and a common goal and a common standard and never compromise; some things are like blood sugar, with some tolerance but not the breadth; but there are some things like thyroxine, to which there is just not enough latitude to talk about — salvation was defined.
- He closes in the tenth chapter of Acts: Peter argued with God that Hormel and Oscar Mayer had never touched his pure Jewish lips; finally challenged by God, he went to the Gentiles and preached, and while he was preaching the Holy Ghost fell on a generation and a culture outside of the Jewish vision. When Peter came back he was accosted and lambasted, because they knew he had been eating ham — and Peter defended himself this way: "Who was I to resist God, who poured out on the Gentiles the like precious gift as he did on us at the beginning?" If you want to take tongue-talking out of redemption, you are going to have to go back and move how it started, at the beginning. The recording ends mid-charge, on that sentence.
Scriptures: Acts 10
Scripture index: 1 Kings 2:1-4; 1 Peter 1:23; Matthew 19; Judges 21:25; 1 Corinthians 3:21-23; Acts 10.
Transcript
there's as you're seated I want to thank the gracious Saints of the Pentecostals of Alexandria for once again your gracious godly hosting of this conference the secret to every successful trip journey or pioneering effort is that you must travel light half of the adducts discomforts and worry and frustrations with new ventures is dealing with the excess baggage that you thought you could not do without when you begin the journey the longer the journey the more carefully you must scrutinize the things that you will bring along and that will accompany on the trip will the utility in service of each be worth its weight and care in room many of the pioneers that left the eastern shores of the United States Prem dimming demure women with the courage of a pioneering spirit to match the strong masculinity of their husband's heart could not part with long treasured family heirlooms the wagon already over laden with things that would be absolutely essential to traverse a Kansans prairie or a Colorado mountain or the deserts of Nevada and California not wishing to break her heart nor to shatter the dream of an heirloom saved the husband often would reluctantly give in but somewhere in the midst of the journey finally the stark realities of the task at hand would weigh heavily on the wagon train left behind the weather and bleach and ruin were many treasured heirlooms that have been passed from generation to generation because the sterner considerations of water and provision and protection seemed to weigh heavy on the pilgrims that move from the east to the west its reflections like these that captured the mind and our minds when we read in the book that Moses took the bones of Joseph with him the coffin of bones on a wilderness march a burning desert the cross a wandering wasteland that needed to be traversed it was natural for Joseph's thoughts to turn toward home at a time of his death how often we carry our dead home to bury them but sometimes sentiment must give way to sterner considerations and circumstances apart from the encumbrance that these unnecessary bones would be how honourable it would have been for a son of the Hebrews to be more memorialized in the centuries by being ensconced in a pyramid what a tribute to a son of Jacob to lie with thee with the Regal rulers of Egypt left behind as a memorial of a man of God that had visited a land that was guarded that was godless some of the greatest and most profound incidents that happen in life are often the simplest there is no explanation for what Moses did the incumbent and the all almost dangerous act of idealism that caused him to carry the bones with him there is either no explanation for Moses's action it is either an unfortunate act of idealism sentimentalism and attachment to the past or else it is pregnant with truth and powerful for instruction to our generation for Billy and I examines the baggage of Pentecost that we carry with us from the past what will its value what will its utility be as we brave the complexities of the 90s that we all face how functional will they be and how useful were the bones be of the past that we are carrying in today's needs and amaze problems today's complexities how valuable with these things be we are traveling further and faster psychologists tell us that the average American faces more pressure
in 24 hours than the average American did in a year span 24 five years ago our spiritual belongings are being challenged at the custom houses of higher thought as we enter the new frontier of an end time error why are we carrying past traditions and sentiments how useful will things one treasures and heirlooms passed from generations ago be useful as we follow God into the new frontiers of evangelism and the purposes of God it is in such a dilemma that the church finds itself posture tonight because nothing that has purpose or does not have purpose no longer has value if there is not a definitive reason for what you do and why you do then what you do and why you do no longer has any value why is it and I'm sure that you have stood with me braving the tears heart palpitating spirit lifted patriotism vibrating in your soul as you stood in Arlington Cemetery and watch the changing of the guard of the Tomb of the Unknown soldiers I don't think any of us imagined that a Russian bear or a Chinese dragon will breach the Atlantic to steal those bones away from us unknown men that have failed in valor and courage in battles long-forgotten yesterday why why such pomp why such circumstance why such ceremony why such reverent feeling over the tomb of bones that are unknown I'll tell you why because there are things that should not be forgotten there are sacrifices made that should not be abandoned there are territories one that should not be given back hallelujah it was that spirit that drove David when in the setting of his kingdom and making the appointments to his cabinets and under ministers that he selected from the sons of Chell a meth a Hodja who would be the treasurer over the dedicated things in the house of the Lord so that every victory would bring it spoil in its contraband that every measure of courage that every tear and blood and sweat that was ventured in the cause of Jerusalem would not be lost and not be forgotten and we understand how was that was when generations later as despotic woman ascended to the throne unloosed assassins into the house of God to destroy the royal seed could it be that what is occurring in the spiritual world that ISIL is once again unleashed her assassins that seek to destroy the future of the Apostolic message but just as in that day because of the fore side of David and the careful superintendent's of Anna hyah there was in the house of the priests a woman a vision a woman of passion and a woman of insight who stole into the palace and stole out the son who would leave unbroken the chain of blood from Judah that would point to the Redeemer praise God because of the times had provided for us a treasury of dedicated things and I hear men rising to this pulpit pulling off the wall the swords and spears and shields of past battles and coming to this pulpit with fresh vision and fresh voice and giving us fresh vision and victories the challenges of the 90s the church that I pastor will survive me it has the Ministry of God carries that will outlive mine it has a ministry that is more enduring and more important and of greater consequence than my personal input into the kingdom of God therefore it's ministry must be carefully guarded and it must be understood in the light of the progress of God's time and vision what it inherits for leadership is in my hands what it does with what I pass on to it they will stand and answer to God for that should I mentor someone who understands the timeless non generational aspect of the ministry of the church or should i sentence them to a leadership who does not understand the
timelessness and non generational impact of the ministry of that church who must relearn and adapt themselves to a self Pern self-centered selfish ministry that they must adapt to I say no we have done that long enough the Church of God cannot be held hostage to a selfish self-centered generation of ministry but we must understand that this church has a call and a calls and a purpose that preceded us and that will likewise follow us will the church and is the church generations removed from its birth as the Ricka bites to continue the allegiance to apostolic truth or as the Pharisees and Sadducees of the day of Jesus will we now see an evolution of truth that will conform to the culture and the ideology around it in second Kings or first Kings chapter 2 the first four verses of Scripture we see a transition of generations we see David placing into the hand of Solomon the sacred leadership of God's people and God's purposes in the earth he gives him very careful in stern reminders and warnings of the things that have been mediated to him and handed to him in a relay race it is run in a very scientific in a very definite manner in a relay race the slowest man on the team runs first when he carries the baton he always carries it in his right hand and as he reaches the end of his responsibility he passes the baton to the man that will receive it who is the next slowest man in the race the man who receives a baton will receive it with a trailing left hand he will take it in full stride he will immediately turn it to his right hand and then carry it for his to find or determine point in the relay race it is passed on until finally it is placed in the hand of the fastest man on the team who will carry it across the finish line there is a way to give truth there is a way to receive truth and unless we understand the principles in mediating the Word of God as for the man imported to us last night there is more than just contending for the faith but there is a delivering of the faith there is a zone of transition in which the baton has passed in that zone of transition the man that was giving up the baton is in full stride the man who is receiving the baton is in full stride so that there is no slowing or acceleration that there is no Kassadin see there are no lost fractions of a seconds because it is in the changing of the baton where the race is won and lost we cannot afford we cannot afford to let one generation die before the next generation rises in full stride too the visions and the purposes and the ministry of the apostolic message in our world we cannot afford for this generation to get up to speed we cannot wait for you to get to your 30s and 40s before you begin to make significant contributions to the kingdom of God you must now receive with meekness the engrafted word there is a way to give truth there's a way to receive truth in the average bee colony there are 60,000 bees in the in the bee colony there are it is delineated and defined and divided by the balance of the hive and the future of the hive there are sentinels that stand on the hive with 1200 scent organs in each antenna protecting the hive against any danger encroachment from the outside let's not be too quick to silence the voice who detects spirits among us and sound the warning because they are prefer the protection of the whole highs they may not be workers in wax and they may not be workers in honey and they may not have other ministries within the hive but God has placed them there for their defined and definite purpose for the survival of the entire hive there are workers in wax who continually repair the hive and keep it renewed hallelujah we have those ministries there are workers in honey who constantly see that the younger fed who constantly see that the revival and
the evangelism and the birth of the church the honey is placed at each cell then the larvae is placed there the egg is placed by the queen then it hatches and becomes a larva and it feeds on that food but there is in the high foragers foragers who go out in search of nectar to keep the hive functioning and progressing and growing and healthy and in balance foragers have such special sensitivities the things the no one else in the hive has they have a pioneering spirit they have a reaching out spirit they have a spirit that is always foraging for a new place for the hive to venture and as they go and come when they land on the hive a forager that's found a new resource that forager will land on the hive if he dances in a circle he is telling the hive the honey is less than a hundred yards away if he dances in a figure-eight he is telling the hi that the honey is beyond the hundred yards from the hive depending on how fast he Wiggles his tail as he dances tells them dimensionally and proportionally how far from the hive that it is if he lands vertical in the hive he tells the foragers that you are to go geometrically opposite from the direction of the Sun that I have landed on the hive if he lands vertically than they are to go geometrically in there in dimension to the to the Sun away from the hive the reason that the communication is so important is that if that forager takes more honey than it needs to go out gather the nectar in return then the balance of the hive will not be maintained for the honey if he communicates inaccurately then then another bee may not take enough honey and may go out and foraging and in foraging they may die before they return it is so critically important for the balance of the hive that there to be strong clear communication I've heard something from me and there have been some spiritual places I've heard from a woman that has found some nectar hallelujah but you know how the forager tells the rest of them to be sure they got the right thing is because when he comes back and lands and does his dance he goes from forward to the forager and I guess I'm a little paste of the nectar just a little taste of the nectar so that you know when you get there what it's going to taste like hallelujah it more important than telling truth it's more important than telling what right there must be a giving there must be a giving of a case of what miracles and prayer and revival and sacrifice and dedication and consecration heals hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah about ten years ago or more science digest came out with an article that was particularly stunning to me it's told the article was taken from the New England Journal of Medicine and in the article it told about a problem that the medical practitioners the medical industry in America faces and it talked about diseases there was the our energetic and the nosocomial diseases the our of genetic diseases or diseases that are indigenous in a building or a hospital there are the staph infections and the kind of things that are just in that hospital 5% of the people that come to the hospital and are admitted are cured and they are healed of things that they bring with them but when they leave the hospital and or when they enter the hospital though they're cured they pick up one of these staph infections and diseases and 5% of them die healed of other things but then died of some other malady the Noster comité diseases is where a surgeon goes in to do surgery and he is to do one thing but in a moment of tenseness in the operating room or inattention or whatever he he does some damage some inflicted damage that should have not occurred while the surgery was taking place God began to speak to my heart he said he said to me that in the communicating of truth and in the trying of passing on a spiritual perspective in vision are you allowing within the church for there to breed spirits and diseases that people can come in and healed and be saved from adulteries and moralities and for from dishonest ease and drugs only to be given a disease that's indigenous to the institution that kills them and slays them is that
what Jesus meant when he spoke to the Pharisees and said when you make a convert you make him a twofold child of the devil I wonder how many people wonder wounded in this world because of the uncaring inattentive hand of a preacher a hearts been damaged a minds been warned a spirits been dwarfed because of the bigotries and biases and prejudices that all of us have to fight and deal with in our ministries when I walked into the prayer room in this building Tuesday morning early I was met with something I haven't felt in a long long time there was a spirit of holiness that that approached me in that in that prayer room I failed at a back bench I began to pray I could not control the tears as God began to wash me and I heard the voice of the Lord say it will court choir a greater degree of purity it will require a higher benchmark of pure motive and spirit to affect my purpose in the end time than it ever has preachers it's time that we stop taking ourselves too seriously and understand that there is a dimension to this work of God that was before me and if God carries will be after me and I do not have the right to setup institutional diseases within my church that bend and twist and in fact and saturate the spirits in hearts of people you're not of God not of Christ and what he said that was meant to liberate and set free what he gave that was meant to make us feel with love enjoy in peace renounce to making men mean and nasty and bitter and cruel and hateful and judgmental how can I pass the incorruptible seed that liveth and abideth forever how can I commit it to another without painting it without without allowing it with my spirit my heart and my bigotry and my biases and my rebellions in my personal agendas motives it was into this kind of untenable position the Jesus found himself cast I'm not going to talk about issues tonight I'm not going to preach my personal feelings and convictions I'm going to throw a few principles at you and let you and God go home and work it out in your own heart and if your own spirited in your own mind but Jesus found himself in the untenable position of being cast between the conservative and liberal theological schools over the family you'll find the scene portrayed for you in a riveting narrative in the nineteenth chapter of the book of Matthew one school said that divorce could be had for every cause that there was no reason that there was by no standard that a man could be loosed from his wife or a wife loosed from her husband whatever cause was the necessary but the other school far more conservative answered back to the law of Moses and the precedents that Moses had said in his judgment concerning families in their lives together and so they asked Jesus now which camp are you in are you in the liberal school of every cause our master do you stand with the Conservatives Jesus said I take neither posture because both of you are wrong neither posture is the posture that that God intended because he said from the beginning it was not so he took them back to the beginning and at a point of beginning he established a truth that transcends the argument that was germane to the discussion of Matthew chap 19 Jesus said rather it's not where time and culture has brought you but you must go back to the point the beginning and understand the intent of God and then from there you make your adjustments toward the principles that God established I come tonight to establish
a point a beginning in the original thirteen states Kentucky and Tennessee property meet and bounds are determined differently than they are in the rest of the 48 contiguous states in the thirteen original colonies Kentucky and Tennessee all properties are defined by meets and bounds in New England there is a called a principle monument by which every civil engineer who works on a topographical survey works from that principle monument by turning a transit so many degrees minutes and seconds and measuring so far from that principle monument that the meets and bounds of all property and states and real estates government jurisdictional territories are defined you cannot buy or sell a piece of property without having a current survey within the last 30 days that relates back to a principle point of beginning from that point of beginning every state has established in reference to it within a logarithm applied for the curvature of the earth so that every state in the original colonies has a principal marker established based on the principal market monument in New England in the other 48 contiguous states property is divided into subdivisions of so many square miles they're divided into subdivisions of piles and ranges based on their their position from an initial point within that plot that's defined from a principal Meridian or a base meridian and so many many tiles and ranges north and east or south and west determines were a piece of property and it's reference is still referenced back to that initial point everything answers back to that principle point every survey in every plat books in every county courthouse does not begin an end with the developer nor who first staked out the property but that piece of property is related all the way back unerringly and accurately to that principal monument in that point of beginning hallelujah without a defined point of beginning you can never determine a boundary you cannot lay out a foundation you cannot construct a building when this building was built some civil engineer established in relationship to some known monument in reference to a known point he placed the point of beginning on this property that the structural engineer turned off from his transit so many degrees and minutes and seconds and measured out so many feet and defined one corner of what this building was going to be once he defined that corner he constantly turned back measuring it in at least three quadrants in case there was an infinitesimal error in any quadrant of the transit to then establish the control line on which all the footings and all the column lines would be built and established in this building because if you don't have a point of beginning will you get so far in that building process suddenly things will not start fitting together things just don't come together they won't fit and there has to be architectural adjustments to structural errors because somebody wasn't in did not have integrity at the point of beginning in Atlanta one of the structural engineers in my church was called on a project when the final 14th floor of the building had been set they'd began to set up the fascia wall and put the glass in the building and as they would set the glass on the next story the windows and glass and the story below it will begin to pop out and fall to the ground he was called out to try to ascertain the problem he find he's took a transit went to the benchmark every every building program has a benchmark an engineer sets a benchmark that is a known elevation and then the building will be set at an
elevation the floor the poured finished floor will answer back to that benchmark elevation and from that then all the building will rise symmetrically architectural and structurally from that base known point of elevation he measured the elevations at each corner column and found them all to be within 1/8 inch of level well within norms but when he finally after three days went and looked at the column lines he found that the engineer had eight different control lines that he was working over in the final analysis they had to tear the building back down to the foundation they had to blast out the anchor bolts reset the control lines accurately from the point of beginning and start all over with the building we cannot afford to get this far and start tearing the church down I'm fastly running out of time let me get to my points let me say this if you want to go back to the point of beginning this thing begins and end in God it doesn't begin in an organization it doesn't begin an end in any personality's past present or future this thing starts and finishes in the Lord Jesus Christ hallelujah mobile settlement God has never engineer to pull pitch big enough for my prejudices and my biases in my pants and my twist he the Bears the vessels of the Lord let him be pure the sons of Levi need their kisum of holiness because when you go back to the foundation of this world when you go back to the beginning before there was a star before there was a universe before the Teran stretched his neck before the elephant lumbered across the the prairies of Africa God laid a foundation in a pool of blood this thing starts with sacrifice and redemption it's the point of beginning and when you try to establish the church on any other premise than sacrifice and redemption you're starting off the wrong control line and when you get far along in the building project suddenly things just aren't gonna start fitting together things are going to start falling out of the building and you're gonna have problems when people are born of incorruptible seed or Western cattlemen are careful in allowing what seed what semen is passed on in their thoroughbreds so that only pure bloodlines are passed on the Word of God is given to us incorruptible and if it is mediated incorruptible it will produce Christianity but if I place my generational bit if I let the genes and chromosomes of my spiritual bigotry paint the seed I'll start having a different offspring and what the incorruptible seen malicious the foundation of the world was laid sacrifice did you hear for the my chance this afternoon where was the point of beginning in the sanctuary it was the altar this thing doesn't start in the pulpit it doesn't start in the choir it doesn't start at the keyboard it doesn't start in the foyer
it starts right here in the altar it starts the pie the beginning the point of beginning is the altar hallelujah I said every building site has a benchmark structural engineer that built our building r2 drove me insane checking control acts checking back two points the beginning before every anchor Bowl was set and wide before the concrete was poured he would go back to the benchmark he would check from the benchmark tell him Alex my god man you're going to wear a hole in the concrete checking that elevation but he said brother fuller it's got to be right it's got to be right you don't understand just a small error in the point of beginning transmits into major major in her as you transmit it down the building God didn't initiate the benchmark in the elevation of the Apostolic movement it's not based on the unity of the Spirit but it's based on the fullness of the stature of the man Christ Jesus the benchmark is Jesus Christ he is the place that I must measure back to him my motives my doctrine my spirit my values my purpose we benchmark the benchmark of apostolic truth in Greenwich England there is known what is called the Prime Meridian from it all the lat/long longitude and latitude for the whole entire mapping of the world is determined and taken off from that prime meridian that prime meridian defines where time begins from it all time is measured in the Pacific man has arbitrarily put a very crooked line called the International Dateline to two kind of segments out where the day changes but the the Prime Meridian that passes through Greenwich England does not have curvatures and bends and twists and turns the Caprice and decision of men but it is a line applied mathematically it is a my line plied very carefully taking into concern the consideration the conservative curvature of the earth it establishes the zero Meridian from where all things are established when the Bible talks about landmarks it's not talking about generational prejudices when the Bible talks about landmarks it's not talking about cultural ideologies when the Bible talks about landmarks it is not talking about a circuit is curving weaving line that men have established to say this is where truth is but it is a line it is a place that has been established the which there there is no latitude there's no Caprice there's no bias there's no allowances for personal prejudice the Ricka bites understood the point of beginning the John our dad had in mind those Bible landmarks mark two things they were given for direction they were to mark inheritances to move a landmark was the confused direction and to move the landmark was to also confuse the boundaries of the inheritance when I think I'm big enough and smart enough and wise enough to tell the Church of the Living God that it must turn it's transit on me and what I think I better be sure of where I stand and what landmark I'm pointing to lest I confuse a direction or less i encroach and destroy in inheritance in
life there are true points of reference where truth can honestly and really be ascertained where every position I think where every judgment I make where every value I hold can be referenced I define my marriage not to the cultural tendencies of the 90s but I define it by the principle landmark that he established at the beginning I do not I do not allow again the cultural migrations the president of the Southern Baptists Commission's board lives next door to me he said something to me the other day that was so profound he said theologians have nearly destroyed our movement by their delineating over issues between the conservative and moderate greens he said we are establishing some training centers in Russia but they won't be Theological sinners they're going to be points of nurturing disciple because we've realized Jesus called disciples and disciples don't divide in muddy issues like theologians down i define my salvation from what he established and a point of beginning i understand my moral values I'm not confused about what's worthy there's a point of beginning here that gives me such carefully delineated principle I understand my sexuality not by the culture that I live in please hear me mr. president I established it on the basis of a true point of the king imagine the chaos would suddenly occur in our world men arbitrarily moved the Prime Meridian maps wouldn't mean anything anymore the reason there's such a problem with faith in the North America Church is because limes are constantly being erased and moved and then erased and moved back and the reason you don't have that in Asia in Africa is because there's such a simplicity of staying at the point of beginning a staying founded in a pool of blood I'm never getting very far in your reference from the foundation national boundaries become confused no longer do governmental jurisdictions have Authority where they once did because the limes are lived marine navigation becomes impossible air travel becomes a dangerous venture jesus said the children of world are wiser in their generation and the children of light because every chemist answers back to some standard that defines a point of beginning in his discipline every mathematician applies his science methodically with tremendous faith in its outcome because he answers back to a standard that was said at a point of beginning dr. ray clapper doesn't capriciously practice medicine by his own volition but he answers back to a very careful scientific well-defined point of beginning for diagnosis an application of cure even the butcher that weighs your meat has to answer back to some standard there in the Washington BC the Bureau of Standards holes in hermetically sealed rooms where temperature and atmosphere and humidity cannot tamper with the sacredness of weights and measures and every scale in America whether it's weigh a semi-truck at the side of the highway or a butcher weighing a few
ounces of baloney for the widow at his counter all answer back to the standards of the weights and measures in that Bureau of Standards no brethren we don't have to answer to the United Pentecostal church and no brethren we do not have to answer to any man but we will all stand before him and we will all answer back to the same standard just got a couple more things to say I'm sorry but ah I'm sorry I'm encroaching autonomy without accountability leads to anarchy Webster defines anarchy is without governmental authority he also defines it as confusion and disorder but in his new world dictionary desktop edition he says that anarchy is simply the absence of a common purpose or standard if there's anything that defines us it could be the absence of a common purpose or standard because everybody wants to be the landmark where every transit is turned off from to establish the point of beginning the last place I found that I find it in the book of Judges and the Bible says that there was there was unbounded permissiveness and there was bottomless decadence and depravity because every man did that which was right in his own eyes because there is enough flesh in this to dam me because there is enough in this brain to get me off course to make me think that I know I need the accountability of my organization I need to be accountable to brethren they cause autonomy without that accountability will lead me and leave me absent from a common purpose and a common standard Paul wrote to the Corinthian church and he said therefore let no man glory in man for all things are yours whether Paul or Apollo's or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present of things to come all things are yours the man yo can never deny me what Jesus Christ has given me the Liberty to have let no man glory in man no man can ever be my point of reference in my point of beginning but but the desire to be free root and all of our hearts there's an overwhelming passion to do as we please it's one of the deepest passions of human nature a child resists restraint nations the pair of their freedom wrenched from them only only our silence while the seeds and the storms and the fires of revolution burn until they break out questing and reaching for freedom again it's appalling not to be free because the basic endeavor of human life is to be emancipated and the purpose that Jesus Christ came was to set me free home that's economically imprisoned there's no financial arable elbowroom natural desires of the family confronting the prohibition of them never being enough money then finally affluence comes the freedom that it brings now for the first time in life things can be mine things can be had because freedom financially has come raised in a home with a prohibitive code of ethics and rules don't was the most word that I heard all
my life now broken away I snapped the bondage of codes and rules now I will express myself the world lies before me all things remind America a nation humiliated enslaved to England Patrick Henry's cry was give me liberty or give me death strange statement mr. Henry in a very strange dichotomy because often what happens is I get both I get my liberty and because I L manage it and because I do not understand that my liberty is predicated on a point of beginning I destroy and I damage myself I take the liberty of God and I turn it to lasciviousness and I self-destruct I pollute my own tipple I destroy my own soul because I don't understand that there is a principle monument it establishes Liberty from which I must define what is that point of beginning wherever Liberty is born it always is born at win because all things are yours and he our Christ the thing that mandates and the thing that governs and sets boundaries to my Liberty is that I have a loyalty I have allegiance I have a principle monument that I must answer back to I belong to him I belong to him I belong to him Liberty without loyalty ruins us Liberty without loyalty destroys us not close but you say brother fuller somewhere there must be tolerance somewhere within the organisms of men the brushing of egos the drives of passions and dreams the ambitions pure and impure brushing and rubbing man to man somewhere there must be a tolerance no automotive engineer has ever said at the drawing board and mechanically been began to lay out the combustion engine without a specific points of stress in that engine designing tolerances a place of heat a place of motion at places of energy and in places of power and of points of transmission so the tolerances are built the end less when the ignition is turned and the spark hits and the gas is exploded in the piston the engine self destructs because there's no tolerance in the human body God designed us understanding that my life does not follow a level plateau of norms and because there are times of emotional and physical stress and pressure my heart feels the anxieties that the engine the metabolism of my body begins to fire it and as it fires it my heart begins to race and the blood fly flow begins to increase and the pressure elevates in my in my heart arteries veins a cardiovascular system 120 over 80 is missed gnorm but my body has an amazing tolerance for my blood pressure to fluctuate well beyond that high well if in the physical drive of accomplishment I push myself to a limit my blood pressure can elevate almost to it to a stroke point and it not create any residual a long-term damage to my body because God built that measure of tolerance in so that my body could function within the metabolism in the endocrine and Doctrine system the pancreas creates insulin and it keeps my blood sugar the thing that part of my metabolism that really manufactures the energy and fuel that my cells are driven on my blood sugar level again has an established medical norm that also has fluctuations high and low for periods between meals and fastings at times when I've just gorged myself with the Snickers the metabolism kicks in and the blood sugar level rises dramatically but
my body is amazingly amazingly able to handle those shifts and moods as long as they are within levels of tolerance but in the thyroid there is a tiny enzyme that is manufactured called thyroxine I'll check my medical facts with dr. Clippers so I know what I'm saying is right thigh racks and there's never any more of thyroxine in your body then basically is what's on a pinhead just an infinitesimal amount it's a it's an enzyme that actually sets the metabolism level of the body if there's just a little bit too much it fires up the engine and it runs it too hard and will literally send the body into trauma and you'll die or if there's an infinitesimal amount less than that such a small small tolerance then things will happen chemically in the brain and actually dementia and insanity can occur you see there are some things brethren to the like blood pressure there's just a whole lot of tolerance that we can have and the body can function in the body can go and the United Pentecostal church can adhere to a common purpose and a common goal and a common standard and never compromise but there are some other things brother Kilgore that are like like blood sugar there's some tolerance but there's just not the breadth of fluctuation there there is with blood pressure but there's some things like that oxen there's some things to which there's just not enough latitude to talk about salvation was defined and I'm out of time but I'm not out of message no sir I'm not going to encroach of another man but in the 10th chapter of Acts Peter argued with God that Hormel and Oscar Mayer had never touched his pure Jewish lips finally challenged by God he went to the Gentiles and he preached and while he was preaching the Holy Ghost fell on a generation and culture outside of the Jewish vision and when Peter came back he was accosted and lambasted because they knew he had been eating ham and he had gotten some bacon and they didn't have any and Peter defended himself this way who was I to resist God who poured out on the Gentiles the like precious gift as he did on us at the beginning if you want to take tongue talking out of out of redemption you're going to have to go back and move how it started at the beginning
Scripture references as spoken: 1 Kings 2:1-4; 1 Peter 1:23; Matthew 19; Judges 21:25; 1 Corinthians 3:21-23; Acts 10.