Anointing And Shekinah

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 1992 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Holiness · Faith · Ministry and Calling

James Kilgore — introduced by the host and honoured with a song before he takes the pulpit (both seamed out of the span, packet.md) — preaches as a co-founder of this conference to the conference he helped begin. His burden is the step beyond the anointing: every believer in the room has been anointed, but there is a deeper place, the Shekinah glory of God, and a church that settles for the anointing alone will preach its little sermon and go home unchanged. He reads no text and announces none; the message is carried by exposition, testimony, and the ministry that follows it.

Ordinary men, an extraordinary God.

He begins where the conference began: the founding brethren wanted a place of inspiration and direction, and the vision God gave him in the first year — young people streaming out with their Bibles turned to weapons, light, and keys — is still alive. The preacher himself is just an ordinary man with an extraordinary God: the heroes of Hebrews 11 were ordinary men who blundered and failed, and God was not ashamed to be called their God. So the charge is determination — pastors who are not sure they are in the will of God must renew their burden and vision here, or go home and resign; he speaks as a man certain of his own place, thirty-four years pastor of Life Tabernacle in Houston.

Scriptures: Hebrews 11

Beyond the anointing to the Shekinah.

The glory he describes was in the tabernacle's holy of holies, where the priest eased the blood past the veil once a year and every family head waited trembling for the glory cloud; it fell at the temple's dedication, when trumpeters, singers, and a hundred and twenty priests became one voice and the glory filled the house until the priests could not stand; it shone through the clay of Jesus' flesh on the mount, until the disciples said it was good to be there. It still comes where a people get past fault-finding into one mind and one accord. His father preached the gospel the first time in a hostile town after a twenty-one-day prayer vigil, and sinners broke before he could preach — eighteen received the Holy Ghost the first night, eighteen more the second, until the saloons closed. In Ethiopia, he is told, the dead are raised and the Holy Ghost falls by the tens of thousands, because they have gone beyond the anointing into a perfect unity. (These movements are narrative exposition; no text is located or read in them, and the packet prices their citation candidates severally.)

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

To know him.

The keynote of the meeting, he says, is anointing — and to know Jesus. Paul's conversion became a conviction, the conviction a commitment, and the commitment a burning desire to know the one he had written and preached about: to know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings. That knowing costs: in the garden, Jesus himself went a little further. Four years ago Kilgore, tired and half sick, handed his work to a younger man who was like a son to him — and then watched him sicken and die while Kilgore refused to accept it, until the dying man himself asked to be let go. Thrust back onto the firing line, he works longer hours than ever, consumed with one thought, because the coming of the Lord is near. You have to suffer to feel: the blind pastor who built his own church board by board, seeing what ordinary vision could not, was going a little beyond the ordinary.

Scriptures: Philippians 3:10

Holiness is love, forgiveness, mercy.

He asked God to teach him holiness from the word itself, and what he saw was compassion on the multitude, and mercy on a woman taken in adultery, whom Jesus would not condemn; the only people Jesus ever condemned were hypocrites. So holiness is not a list of things given up: a man who holds bitterness in his heart does not belong to holiness, however he looks. A preacher carried a bitter grievance against Kilgore for eleven years, confessed it at this conference, and was forgiven on the spot and embraced. He recites the old Calvary poem — at the foot of the cross there are no big ones and little ones; the ground is level — and a prophetic word of forgiveness and surrender sounds before he lands the movement: suffering is what teaches a man to feel with others. A fellow preacher who lost his only son can comfort a mother whose child has died as no one else can; a woman who had lost her own child was the only one who could persuade a grieving mother to release hers.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The testimony.

His own parents were pioneer preachers who never had a house but always had a home. On a meeting trip before Kilgore was born, their six-month-old son took pneumonia and died in a rocking chair in his mother's arms; his father had no money for a casket, was given boards at the lumber yard, nailed the little box together himself, and buried his boy in a lonely cemetery — and twenty-five miles down the road God gave them a revival where fifteen hundred people were baptised. Then Kilgore calls up his grandson. The boy's father — Kilgore's son-in-law and associate — is the younger man whose death runs through this sermon, and the boy was fifteen when, in his brokenness, he turned to the Lord; his grandfather would walk into his room and feel he was walking into the very presence of God, hearing him pray and dedicate his life. The young man testifies himself: a short, steady word about the strength of the Lord, learning to trust him through the heartaches and the good times alike, and being placed back on stable ground. Kilgore takes the floor again with a prediction — if this boy walks with God, the church will hear a powerful young evangelist — and a word for another pastor in the building program: the suffering is bringing a real victory, because suffering is how a man learns to feel. (The boy is named in the message; his name is withheld here in every form, and the reading he gave inside his testimony is his own — it is priced in the packet and not indexed on his grandfather's record.)

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The altar call.

The close belongs to preachers' wives. A preacher under pressure always has somebody to help him; a preacher's wife hides her pain and her hurt, lost in the crowd. Kilgore calls them to stand — the Lord knows the hurt, and he is going to heal some broken hearts here today — and then calls the preachers to stand beside their wives and take them by the hand, until the whole building is standing and feeling after the Lord together. His ministry runs to the end of the span; a closing word by another brother follows it on the recording and is seamed out of this record (packet.md).

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Hebrews 11 · Philippians 3:10

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)