The Next Move Is Your Move

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 2004 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Faith · Missions and Evangelism · The Church

Kenneth Haney — welcomed to the pulpit as general superintendent, an office he took up after thirty years of pastoring — preaches a morning charge to the ministers of the conference: the church cannot have church as usual, cannot have organisation as usual, and cannot measure itself against other groups. Everything in the span is Haney's own voice, from his read text to the prayer ministry he leads at the close.

Church as usual is over.

He has sat where they sit: for years he came to conventions like this one burning up on the inside, sometimes leaving early because he could not wait to get home and get going. The apostolic message, he insists, is drastically different from other religions, and the comparison habit is the trap — take the book of Acts as the yardstick and see what God can do. There are six billion people in the world; concepts must change, attitudes must change, faith must be increased. It cannot be methodical, and no man will do it alone: if we get what Kenneth Haney can do, that is not what we need — we need what the Holy Ghost can do through a man totally surrendered to God.

The text: four lepers at the gate.

He reads his text himself from 2 Kings 7: Elisha's prophecy that by tomorrow a measure of fine flour would sell for a shekel in the gate of Samaria; the lord on whose hand the king leaned, doubting that God could make windows in heaven, and the sentence pronounced on him — you will see it with your eyes but not eat of it; and the four leprous men at the entering of the gate reasoning with one another: if we sit here, we die; if we enter the city, the famine is there and we die; come, let us fall to the host of the Syrians — if they save us alive, we live, and if they kill us, we shall but die. Out of the lepers' reasoning comes the message's refrain, which the house takes up and makes personal: the next move is your move — the next move is my move. God, he says, is capable of doing far beyond anything we are able to ask or think; the call of the hour is not band-aids but stirring: get out of the box, shake a world, believe God for the miraculous and for world revival. What the conference had been doing all morning, he says, was creating an atmosphere where God can work.

Scriptures: 2 Kings 7:1-4

The opposition.

There is an element even within the movement, he charges, that does not believe in the supernatural — not in angels, not in the gifts of the Spirit — and fights it at every corner, printing its books and literature to defame men of God and discredit every miracle; he names them enemies of the cross and of revival, and calls apostolic men to stop playing church with that spirit. Against it he puts his own creed on record: I believe in angels, I believe in divine healing, I believe in miracles, I believe in a Holy Ghost revival. It is time, he says, for the true preachers — the anointed Acts 2:38 church — to become bold in the Spirit: take our cities, signs and wonders, miracles, a revelation of who God really is. The God preached in Acts 2:38, he warns later in the message, is more powerful than our preaching has grasped — the God who created the heavens and the earth.

Unlikely men.

The lepers are the pattern: the four most unlikely men to break the code, decreed unclean, shut outside the gate — yet God used their move, and the doubting lord was trampled in the gate as they went. Haney counts himself among the unlikely: a boy with limited education and limited abilities who had no right to stand where he stands, picked up by God fifty-one years ago; and when God gets ready to shake the earth, he says, he will choose the willingness of men's hearts — your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Some in the house, he tells them, have been hanging on to their alternatives for twenty-five years; he did not come this far to throw in the towel or take a step backwards. There are only two things that can happen when you start down to the enemy's camp: they feed you and you live, or they kill you and you die — but your decisions determine your destiny.

Heart, not logic: Jonathan.

He names First Samuel and declines to read it, then tells it entire: a deplorable state in Israel under Saul, the Philistines having stripped the swords out of Israel until a man had to go down to the enemy's camp to sharpen a tool, the enemy's foot on their neck while the hills around them were loaded with the very minerals of steel. Against that stands Jonathan and his armor-bearer before the Philistine garrison — Jonathan's proposal that they reveal themselves, and the armor-bearer's answer: do whatsoever is in your heart. That is the movement's turn: we talk too much intellectual stuff, too much logic, and logic will only get you so many souls and a revival to one level. Let your heart talk to you — a heart warmed by the Holy Ghost in a hot prayer meeting and a preaching service like the ones of last night and this morning. It was in this connection that he had said at this same conference two years before, and says again, that he sees millions coming to God — entire Trinitarian congregations; there is a whole church in your town ready to be baptised, he tells the standing pastors, if a man will get out of the box, sit across the table, and show kindness instead of obnoxiousness.

Scriptures: 1 Samuel

Change the image: Babel.

The church's internal image must change, and his exhibit is Genesis 11: after the flood, one group building a city erected a tower that reached into the heavens, and God came down to observe and returned his report — this they have a mind to do, and the words Haney puts into the house's mouth in repeat: nothing can be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Nothing, he preaches, can stop a church that has a vision and the right kind of image: he sees his baptistry troubled morning, noon and night, churches in use, great things going down in his city because his image has changed.

Scriptures: Genesis 11:6

The weapons of our warfare.

Then Paul writing to the church at Corinth, and the text is performed, not merely quoted: Haney leads and the house repeats, phrase upon phrase — the weapons of our warfare are not carnal; you cannot build a church carnal and expect it to be anything else; but mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds; casting down imaginations. Get rid of the barrier, he tells them — it is called vision, where you are going, what you see. If you said a fifty-soul revival, see what God can really do: Noah went into the ark in the minority and came out the majority. And he speaks his own new image over the city: the lame walking, the dumb talking, the blind seeing, the dead coming to life — not only in church services, but the literal, physical dead.

Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Do it, and move.

How will it happen? You do what God says. At the grave he said to roll the stone away, and the objection came that by this time it was too late — but God will never do for you what you can do for yourself; when you have done everything you can do, he will perform the miraculous. At the wedding, when the wine failed, his mother did not even argue with him — she knew who he was — and turned to the servants with her instruction to do whatever he said; and Haney takes the word up as the close's refrain: do it. If he can turn the water into wine, he can fill the building. We need to get wild, he says — we have been passive too long — and he leaves the house with the reports he hopes to hear: Baptist and Methodist churches receiving the Holy Ghost, a pastor and board baptised in Jesus' name. But it will only happen when the preachers go home and start talking faith, because the next move is your move. The recording closes as it has run throughout, in his own voice: the house on its feet praying for one another, hands laid on one another, Haney leading the ministry and urging them to take the world. (The priced candidates the checking desk has not shipped — the exceedingly-abundantly paraphrase, the enemies-of-the-cross wording, the sons-and-daughters fragment, the Samaria and stone-away wordings, and the wedding instruction — are carried in packet.md with their forks; the summary's scripture lines below are the shipped index only.)

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): 2 Kings 7:1-4 · 1 Samuel · Genesis 11:6 · 2 Corinthians 10:3-5