Unsearchable Greatness

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

On a Sunday night at Greater Bakersfield's First Pentecostal Church in September 2022, Jacob Phillips preaches his signature message from Psalm 145:1-3, opening with a word he says the Holy Ghost gave him that afternoon: the spirits that have impeded revival over this church for years are about to be pushed back, and its greatest days are ahead, not behind. David's text gives the ground: great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. The Psalms reveal the never-changing yet always-moving character of God — in Psalm 103 His benefits are His character (forgiver, healer, redeemer, lover of the soul, compassionate, renewer of youth like the eagle's), and in Psalm 23 He is shepherd, provider, guide, table-preparer, and anointer — but no adjective reaches Him: good is not good enough, great is not great enough. He is not only a great God but a greater God: great bondage meets a greater breakthrough, a great test a greater testimony, and even forsakenness meets the God who will never leave nor forsake. Ephesians 3:20 is corrected from its common misquote — not "exceedingly abundantly" but "exceeding abundantly," greater than abundantly, above all we ask or think.

The argument, as in every preaching of this message, is that God starts with great and works toward greater. Abram must leave his father's house and stop being a dependent to become a dependable father; the promise has to live at Pharaoh's house through the famine, but great plagues fall, and Genesis 13:1-2 records that Abram is first called rich only after he comes up out of Egypt. Ishmael will be great, but the promise runs through Isaac, who became great until he was very great; Esau thinks earthly things at night, but Jacob dreams of angels, and the greater line runs through the one whose eyes are on things above. Psalm 145:4 makes it generational — one generation praising His works to another — and Phillips aims it at a church established in 1943: your greatest revivals are still ahead of you, and this building will not hold them. At Jacob's well (John 4) the question "Art thou greater than our father Jacob?" answers itself; creation preaches the same pattern, for Genesis 1:16 sets a lesser light to reflect a greater, and the evening-and-morning days move from lesser to greater, moon to sun, John the witness to Jesus the Light. The wedding's best wine saved for last is Haggai 2's latter-house glory in miniature, and the greater works of the sermon are the one thing Jesus never did in His earthly ministry: lay hands on people and see them receive the Holy Ghost — a work reserved for His church, available at a job, a school, or a kitchen-table Bible study, not only at an altar.

The close returns to Psalm 150: praise Him according to His excellent greatness. If God is greater now than when the text was read, praise that matches His greatness can never be less than the last service's. Phillips presses the room not to wait for the right song or singer, prophesies that God can do more in the remainder of 2022 than He has done in this church since 1943, and leads the congregation into an extended altar and warfare-prayer time against the spirits that have resisted revival.

Scripture index: Psalm 145:1-3; Psalm 103; Psalm 23; Ephesians 3:20; Genesis 13:1-2; Psalm 145:4; John 4; Genesis 1:16; Haggai 2; Psalm 150:2.