You're One Step Away From Your Miracle

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 1987 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Faith · Holiness · Healing and Miracles

Jeff Arnold — welcomed to the platform by the host (the welcome and its applause seamed out of the span, packet.md) — opens overwhelmed and nearly wordless: no one in his family serves God but him and his wife Patty, yet this fellowship has taken in a self-described Brooklyn slum runner and honoured him beyond what he knows himself to deserve. He had known for weeks what he meant to preach, and an hour before the service the Lord changed his direction. Before he reads, he tells the house he has spent the conference asking God for a word of knowledge, and three people who could not have known his need walked up to him in tears with one. Then he goes to his text.

Full of the Spirit, returning in power.

Arnold locates Luke chapter 4 and reads it aloud himself: Jesus full of the Holy Ghost, led by the Spirit into the wilderness, forty days tempted, eating nothing; then, skipping to verse 13, the devil departing for a season, Jesus returning into Galilee in the power of the Spirit, teaching in their synagogues and glorified of all. His whole message hangs on the difference between those two conditions. Jesus went into the wilderness full of the Holy Ghost and came out with no more of the Spirit than he carried in — but something happened in between that the record preserves: he returned in the power of the Holy Ghost. Many in the house, Arnold says, came to the conference full; it is the will of God that they leave in power. He announces his subject — you are one step away from a miracle — prays over the preaching, and seats the congregation. Early in the message he also stations a reader at his side, to read when he calls for it.

Scriptures: Luke 4:1-2; Luke 4:13-15

A ministry founded on refusal.

Contrary to Pentecostal concepts, Arnold says, Jesus' miracle ministry was not founded on miracles; it was founded on one word — refusal. All the chaos in the universe traces to a personage in heaven who refused to stay in his place; Christianity itself is the result of God refusing to stand by and watch. Jesus refused to feed himself by his own power, refused to come down from the cross — and, Arnold tells the house, three thousand people have gathered in Alexandria in 1987 over that one refusal from a cross. Then the case he works longest: the demoniac of the tombs, the first streaker, a man with a legion of devils in him, who worshipped Jesus the moment he saw him and was left clothed and in his right mind, sitting at Jesus' feet. God, Arnold notes, answered even the devils' prayer — they went into the pigs, and the pigs would not put up with what people tolerate. He answered the swineherds' prayer and got in the boat to leave their country. But when the delivered man handed in his own request — let me go with you — Jesus said no, and sent him home to be a witness to his own. On the way through, Arnold stops and declares the word of God as the sermon's working rule: resist the devil, and he will flee from you (the James 4:7 wording, voiced without a locator and shipped on the sustained-voicing line, packet.md). Paul is his second witness: three times he asked the Master to take the thorn away, and three times the answer was no — and the thing God refuses to do in a life becomes the avenue to greater revelation. Arnold applies it to himself without flinching: for four years he prayed to get out of Gainesville, and God would not indulge him, because God wanted a great church in that city and intended Arnold to be one of its pastors.

Scriptures: James 4:7

The will must be read.

Jesus' life, Arnold says, was peppered with refusals — he refused a crown without a cross, refused to explain by what authority he acted, refused to tell the sign-seekers plainly what his works had already told them, refused Peter's curiosity about another disciple's calling, refused to say whether he would restore the kingdom at that time. And to Nicodemus he said only that a man must be born again — he never told him how, and Arnold explains why: a man cannot be born again while the testator still lives, because a will is not in force until after the death of the testator. Jesus had to die to put the new birth into effect; the thief on the cross could be saved by faith, but after the testator's death you have to read the will — and the will's terms, as Arnold voices them, are repentance and baptism in Jesus' name and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost (the Acts 2:38 wording, shipped on the functions-as-text line, packet.md). That is why the doctrine of the thief on the cross will not hold water for anyone living on this side of the death that made the will valid.

Scriptures: Acts 2:38

Read the rest of the Bible.

Mid-sermon Arnold turns schoolmaster. He teases the house that most of them would be lost if he left Acts 2:38 — the verse named there as a label, in a jibe at people who camp on one text — and takes them back to the lesson of his own text: God was manifest in the flesh, and the difference between the man Jesus and us is measure. The fullness of the Godhead dwelt in that body around the clock, all nine gifts of the Spirit at home in him; we hold the earnest of the inheritance, a down payment with the rest coming, and the gifts distributed through the body so that for a moment, in a dimension of faith, a believer has access to what lived in Jesus full-time. He returns to Luke 4 — "he returned in the power of the Spirit" — and presses the quiz: Jesus got no more Holy Ghost in the wilderness than he took in; the power was released at the refusal to do business with evil. Churches breed spiritual midgets, he says, because they will not resist. His illustration is his own younger body: years of lifting produced muscle not from the weight and not from the man but from the resistance — and then the declaration becomes a refrain he drives home: resist the devil. Too many precious, moral, modest people carry no more spiritual power than the carpet, because their security is a long list of things they don't do — while Quakers, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and even righteous Baptists of his acquaintance keep disciplines Pentecostals could learn from. A list of don'ts is not resistance.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Children who hear prayer.

It is an insult to the majesty of God, Arnold says, that our children do not hear us pray at home; Noah had an altar when he did not even have a home, and we have homes and no altars. His own daughter is seven years old, and she has heard her daddy talking funny things: she slips into his office on Sunday afternoons while he prays, and he tells her, "Dina Leanne, daddy's praying" — and she stays to watch him weep on the floor. When the phone rings mid-prayer she answers it herself and reports that her daddy cannot come to the phone because he is talking to Jesus. (His own child, told by her father; the redaction exception, 0 markers, packet.md.) Out of that picture comes his resolve to the house: he refuses to prostitute the high call of God just to build something big, and he will not give away the heritage of his fathers or trade the holiness of God for numbers.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The man in the synagogue.

Arnold calls on the reader he stationed at the start: read verse 33 of the same chapter — and in the synagogue there was a man who had a spirit of an unclean devil. He would rather have a person with a devil in the house of God, he says, than in a bar or a honky-tonk, because in the house there is a real chance Jesus comes by and casts it out. This thing is for sinners; the worst wretches in town are supposed to be welcome here and find deliverance — and such were some of you: washed, justified, sanctified in the name of the Lord and by his Spirit (the 1 Corinthians 6:11 wording, voiced entire without a locator and shipped on the sustained-voicing line, packet.md). He takes a breath to swat at his own reputation — call him a slob if you like, just put "saved" in front of it — and warns the veterans that long tenure without souls or example is its own indictment. Then back to the beginning of the world: the devil moved into paradise itself looking for someone to do business with, and there would have been no fall and no crucifix if Eve had refused the serpent. Later he calls the reader again, and the reading resumes in the synagogue scene — the devil crying, let us alone, what have we to do with thee — and Arnold plays the contrast for everything it is worth: in the wilderness the devil had said let's do business; now, facing a man who refuses, he begs to be left alone. What changed the evil one's mind is that he met the first man too full of the glory and power of God to deal with him. Arnold turns it on the fathers in the house: there are giants trying to eat our kids, and the answer is to get on your face before heaven and tell Pharaoh — you can't have my kids; they're going with us.

Scriptures: Luke 4:33; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Luke 4:34

Refuse to quit.

A champion is made by refusals before he ever climbs into the ring — no honky-tonking, no beer, no junk; the boxer eats for the fight. Hunters freeze in a tree all day for one shot and fishermen cast all day with two hundred plugs; shall the people hunting the greatest prize this side of glory refuse to be skunked? Ask any successful person how they got there and the answer comes in one sentence: I refused to quit. Then Moses — recorded in Hebrews, Arnold says, by faith Moses gave up the throne of Egypt, and his rod never became a miracle rod and his hand was never made leprous and whole until after the refusal; all the man did was look at Egypt and say no. He turns the same lens on the bishop he has sat under for thirty years of settled belief, and on his own Gainesville stand: nights of anguish nobody at his church knows about, waking in tongues with tears running, standing alone while the pressure said chuck it all and let people handle their own lifestyles — until, at this very conference, a man he had butted heads with for four years put an arm around him weeping and said he was going home with him to build the church. Your refusal was not in vain. Joseph is the warning that closes the movement: we would never have read his name if, when Potiphar's wife said come lie with me, he had not said no — and tens of thousands of souls were depending on that one refusal.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Bow or burn — and the last refusal.

You do not get the fourth man in the fire until you refuse to bow: the three Hebrew children faced the music and the furnace, and the moment their refusal hit heaven's shores the alarm went off and the angels marched. Daniel got into the lions' den by the same door — told to stop praying, he prayed openly — and the heathen king spent the sleepless night while Daniel slept, and came asking whether Daniel's God had been able to deliver him, and heard that God had sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths (the Daniel 6 wording is voiced inside the narration in paraphrase form and is priced, not indexed, packet.md). Arnold's own adversary text follows from it: refuse to do business with the devil and watch the angel shut his mouth too. His last picture is the first refuser, hanging on Calvary, offered an opiate to dull the dying — and refusing it, because within two minutes the last sinner he could save on this side of the cross would need a sober Saviour to carry him to paradise. We are in the same process of killing the flesh, and the world lifts its own opiate to our lips; if we get drugged with our own comfort, the sinner within our grasp is lost. The sermon then closes with a first-person passage spoken over the house as a word from the Lord — a call to decide, and a promise held out to those who answer (carried in span on the standing pattern; none of its words are attributed to Arnold in this summary, and no citation turns on it, packet.md). Let's worship God.

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Luke 4:1-2 · Luke 4:13-15 · James 4:7 · Acts 2:38 · Luke 4:33 · 1 Corinthians 6:11 · Luke 4:34

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)