His Unspeakable Gifts

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 1996, The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA. Godair, pastor at Durham, North Carolina, and the host's neighbour and friend of many years, comes to this afternoon service straight off a week of preaching he calls awesome, and nearly talks himself out of preaching at all — the move of God already in the house felt sufficient. He preaches anyway, for about forty-five minutes by his own announced measure, on a single text and a single word: the gift of God is unspeakable, beyond describing, and the whole sermon is an attempt to say why — in His power, His perfection, His existence, His birth, His death, His resurrection, and His return. (One block stands outside the sermon's span and is seamed in packet.md: the host's introduction at the head, with the praise cue that follows it.)

Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift

He sends the house to his text and reads it standing: thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift. Two sporting stories frame what the gift does for a man. A great running back carried the ball nine miles in his career and was knocked down, stepped on, and hit every four and a half yards — and got back up every time; and a great explorer's diary answered mutiny, trouble, and rebellion day after day with the same line: we sailed westward today. God gives His people the same ability to rise when they fall, and the same set direction. Then the gift texts themselves, located and voiced in one chain: the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life; and the Gospel's best-known sentence — God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The word he leans on is *so*: a love that cannot be told, only given. A hymn writer's ocean of ink and sky of parchment could not write it out either.

Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 9:15; Romans 6:23; John 3:16; Micah 7:8

Unspeakable in His power, His perfection, His existence

He made all things, and nothing was made without Him; He is the light that lightens every man and spreads the heavens by Himself. As a gift He is beyond every craft: no artist can paint Him, no sculptor chisel Him, no philosopher imagine Him. The perfection litany follows — a garden without a weed, a song without disharmony, no marble white enough, no frame that fits His picture, no crown that fits His brow. He is older than the mother who cradled Him; as much God as if He were not man, and as much man as if He were not God. His lips never said what they should not say, His eyes never saw what they should not see, His mind never thought what it should not think — there was no flaw in Him, and even His worst foe could find no fault in Him at all.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The oneness of the gift

Against every teaching that makes Jesus merely a good man, a teacher, a prophet, or the second person of a Trinitarian concept, he sets the located chain he reads off one after another in this movement: I and my Father are one; when you see me you have seen the Father; the mystery of godliness — God manifest in the flesh; the three that bear record in heaven, and these three are one; the only wise God our Saviour; the Alpha and the Omega, the Almighty; one God, and one mediator between God and men. When you say Jesus, you have said it all. It is not preaching only: forty years ago the next week, he testifies, this same Lord brought him out of sin, baptised him in His name, and filled him with the Holy Ghost.

Scriptures: John 10:30; John 14:8-9; 1 Timothy 3:16; 1 John 5:7; 1 John 5:20; Jude 25; Revelation 1:8; 1 Timothy 2:5

Unspeakable in His birth, and in fulfilled prophecy

The angelic choirs sang over the shepherds, the star led wise men with their gifts, and He who was so rich became so poor — no palace, no satin-lined crib, no perfume; a feeding trough and the back door of the world He Himself created. The sermon then preaches the sermon text of the nativity in full — unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and His name called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace — written some eight hundred years before He was born. A tribe appointed, a family appointed, a place whispered to a prophet: when Jesus was born He was not an accident but the fulfilment of all prophecy. The only true riches anyone has today, he says, are in Him.

Scriptures: Isaiah 9:6

The call to the harvest of 1996

Jesus was never in a hurry: the bread of life, yet hungry; the water of life, yet thirsty; able to still raging waves and to set a child on His knee. That is the spirit the church must recover — every man, woman, boy, and girl is a potential for the gospel, whatever their race, colour, or language. The fields are white and the harvest is ready, but the labourers are few, and Godair believes 1996 will be the greatest year of revival his generation has seen: in one January month, twenty-nine were filled with the Holy Ghost in his own church and thirty-something baptised in Jesus' name. This is no time to sit idly by, complacent, and let the move of God pass: this is our day, our hour, our time.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Unspeakable in His death and resurrection — and the power of His presence

He died to pay the penalty in full — our substitute, bringing justification, sanctification, propitiation, glorification, adoption, and reconciliation in one gift package. No man could guard His body and keep Him in the grave: death could not conquer Him, the grave could not hold Him. But a church can still lose His presence, and there is nothing deader than a dead Pentecostal church. People must feel something when they drive onto the parking lot, before they know anything about what is preached. He tells of the refined congregation where feeling was forbidden — where they answered funny stories with written ha-ha papers and sad ones with boo-hoo on the back — and of the revival in that same state where fifteen received the Holy Ghost after six barren years, because he got down and prayed for them anyhow. Nobody, he says, ever got a bad case of the Holy Ghost.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Talking yourself up for the fight

The worship charges of Scripture are preached as orders, not suggestions: clap your hands, shout unto God with the voice of triumph, let the lifting of my hands be as the evening sacrifice. Then a basketball Hall of Famer's locker-room ritual becomes the sermon's psychology of revival: the scorer talked himself up alone before every game — if I don't score I lose my job, my salary, my family's food — until he jumped up demanding to know where the buzzard was that was trying to kill his wife and kids. The church has let the devil sit on it too long the same way: get in the corner, talk yourself up, and ask where the devil is that says revival cannot happen in 1996.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Unspeakable in His return

The return is preached in the Lord's own words, voiced entire in sequence: let not your heart be troubled — in my Father's house are many mansions; I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again. The men of Galilee are asked why they stand gazing: this same Jesus shall so come in like manner as He went. And the apostle's shout follows — the Lord Himself descending with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God, the dead in Christ rising first, the living caught up to meet Him in the air. The mockers say He is not coming, but the victory text settles the labour question: be stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding — every Bible study taught, door knocked, bus route run, and jail visited will be rewarded. His own church runs seventeen buses and nine vans bringing some five hundred and forty a Sunday, bought another bus that week at a split-the-difference price, and stands one hundred percent debt free where it owed eight hundred thousand three and a half years before. When He comes again He will trade the crown of thorns for a crown of glory and the wooden cross for an eternal throne — and He can still take a blasphemer and make him a preacher.

Scriptures: John 14:2-3; Acts 1:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; 1 Corinthians 15:57-58

When I got the man right, I got the world right

His own granddaughter is in the room — the prettiest little baby in the world, in the arms of the couple he names with pride — and she carries him to the closing story of another old preacher and his little granddaughter, kept for an afternoon while the ladies went shopping, who solved a scrambled jigsaw map of the world in ten minutes because on the back of the pieces was the picture of a man: when I got the man right, I got the world right. Laws and programs and reformations may do some good, but when you get the man right — when you get the heart right — you will change the world. Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)