Because Of The Times

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 2005 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Healing and Miracles · Holy Ghost · Ministry and Calling

Preface: the man who came back.

Before any text, he gives the house his testimony as a preface. A year and two months earlier he had fallen dead in a Sydney, Australia airport restaurant and lain clinically dead — by the ambulance driver's own later account to him, at least forty-five minutes — while the defibrillator failed, its battery died, and a second crew's machine had to be patched in; his heart would catch once or twice and stop, and he was slated for dead-on-arrival before it began beating on its own in the ambulance. The doctor who received him told his sister she could come, but he would not be alive when she arrived; the blood had clotted in his hands, feet and heart. A year later, to the week, he preached again for Brother Ted Slack in Sydney, took the ambulance driver to lunch to hear the story from the only man who really knew it, walked into the doctor's office simply to shake his hand, and had breakfast in the very restaurant, at the spot where he fell. He saw nothing while he was dead, he says — and tells the house why he believes he was sent back: to help God's people, to transmit to them what he knows in the Spirit. He has lived for God forty-two years, he says; he is ready to go and ready to stay. (Inside the testimony he calls Jesus the resurrection and the life, in wording adapted to his sentence; that wording is priced in the packet.)

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

His text: the signs that follow.

He opens his Bible to the last chapter of Mark — the verses he has initialled "TP", tried and proven, the passage he says he has preached from more than any other in the New Testament — and reads it aloud with the house answering him phrase by phrase: the commission to preach the gospel to every creature, the saved and the damned divided by belief and baptism, and the signs that follow believers — devils cast out, new tongues, serpents taken up and deadly drink unharmed, hands laid on the sick and the sick recovering. Then the prayer over it all: a spirit of revelation and understanding, the gifts of the Spirit imparted, the five-fold ministry exploding in the place.

Scriptures: Mark 16:15-18

The last wave.

He names his subject — because of the times — and stakes everything on urgency: this is the last wave of revival, and if this generation misses it, there is not another coming. In the beginning, he says, every believer was a preacher and a soul winner; the miracles were performed in the open, and they shook the Roman Empire — but this people has kept the thing inside four walls, and it is time to take it to the streets. It is already happening here, he says: this week, in a restaurant, Brother Jonathan Suber prayed for someone who was healed, and the waitress who witnessed it broke down and received the baptism of the Holy Ghost on the spot.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The promise for the last days.

The scholars agree, he says, that Christianity toppled Rome; and against the talk of Islam as the fastest-growing religion he sets a New York Times full page from after New Year's reporting Pentecostal religion as the fastest-growing in the world. The Bible does not say Islam will cover the earth in the last days — it says God will pour out his Spirit upon all flesh, and he voices that promise twice over, as what the book says. He tells of Brother Sham from Pakistan: over 365 Pakistanis receiving the Holy Ghost in one meeting, and a Muslim bus driver's growth disappearing under apostolic prayer, the man on the platform that night praising Jesus for it. Jesus is not coming back, he warns, for a watered-down version of what is read in the book of Acts — but for a church without spot or wrinkle, seven times greater than the former rain.

Scriptures: Acts 2:17

The networking, and Singapore.

A report he was given says someone in the world receives the baptism of the Holy Ghost every eighteen seconds — and if God pours out on all flesh what he has poured out on this people, it will tear the world to pieces. In the last year of his travels he has been meeting men and women of God he never knew existed, powerful in the Spirit, and he is watching God network them together, on the same page, because a mighty work is being prepared and God needs a channel to flow through; he can feel that networking happening in this very conference. Then Singapore, the July before: an Encounter Jesus crusade where Brother Willoughby had advertised him as coming to transfer miracle signs and wonders. Two Muslim men were brought in wheelchairs — a younger man felled by stroke, and an aged man paralysed, drooling, warehoused in a nursing home, who had told the Christians his family no longer loved him and the God he had prayed to all his life could not help him. While Stoneking preached, feeling returned to the old man's hands and feet. He walked each man in Jesus' name, steadying but not holding, until each bore his own weight — the younger raising his healed arm as the saints swarmed him and God filled him with the Holy Ghost; the old man walking until the place exploded with worship. Behind them sat an aged Chinese man dying of liver cancer who understood no English; as the people prayed, tears ran down his face, his hands rose trembling, and he burst out speaking with tongues while his Buddhist relatives watched — and when the saints took him to the baptistry, the swollen stomach went flat before their eyes. That December he was back, and the stroke survivor was on the front row, a man who now prays and reads his Bible hours every day.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

Pensacola: ask, seek, knock — and the woman who walked.

Everything in him is bent on awakening the people to the power already inside them: get your people laying hands on each other and taking care of God's business, and he will take care of theirs — he learned that forty-two years ago, and it will cut a pastor's counselling to nothing. He charges the city itself: pray a surge of the Spirit into the streets of Alexandria. Ask, and it shall be given; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened, he cries over the house. (Those ask-seek-knock words are the Lord's own, voiced entire as exhortation with no text named; on the settlement of his own "Choose Your Destiny" packet they are priced in this packet, not indexed.) Then Pensacola, preaching for Brother Welch: on a Sunday night an older woman came to him crippled and in pain for two years — a jackknifed semi had killed her husband and her sister's husband and crushed her. She said she wanted to be healed and believed she would be when he took hold of her; he commanded her body whole in the name of the Lord Jesus, and she began kicking her legs, healed instantaneously. Her neighbour, who had brought her and knew she was crippled, came running for the same thing and fell backwards healed. This Jesus heals anybody, he says — publicans, sinners, everybody; you do not have to be in a Bible study or a member of the church to be healed.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The five-fold pattern.

He prays again for a spirit of revelation and understanding, and then reads the Ephesians text aloud: he gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers — for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, until all come to the measure of the stature of Christ's fullness. Out of the reading he builds the pattern: a kingdom must have a government, so God raised apostles to govern, prophets to guide, evangelists to gather the subjects, pastors to guard the gathering, and teachers to ground them — a master plan, flawless. In the Old Testament the prophets were feared by kings, because position is not power: influence is power, and influence, like respect, cannot be demanded, manipulated or manufactured — it is earned by years of service and faithfulness. The most powerful people on earth before Jesus comes, he prophesies, will not be kings or politicians but men and women of God who can bring down fire, stop the rain, or calm the sea of a troubled life. There is no higher calling than the one entrusted to everyone in the house who preaches the gospel — why stoop to be a king when you could be a preacher? Then he prays the anointing back in: commanding, on the warrant of what is written ("command ye me" — a two-word fragment he takes as his authority inside the prayer; it is priced in the packet, not indexed), that the virtue gone out of every man and woman of God be replaced now.

Scriptures: Ephesians 4:11-13

Send it back.

He turns the house to greet one another — you have power from on high — and then honours his mentor, Brother T. W. Barnes, a prophet of God whose influence in the movement he sets above any office: people fly in for twenty minutes with him; Baptists come to him for deliverance; witches come. One witch came to curse him, walking his office and vowing he would die of exhaustion, never sleeping again. At two in the morning Barnes felt the devil in his room, sat on the side of the bed, and called it to him — because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world — and commanded it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to go back to the one who sent it and do to her what she had sent it to do to him; a couple of hours later his phone rang, the woman screaming and begging him to get the thing off her. That is the power this people holds, Stoneking says, and the charge follows: if the devil has come after you, send him back — send him out of your life, in the name of Jesus. (The greater-is-he wording runs through this movement five times, as Barnes's ground and then as his own refrain; on the settlement of his "Choose Your Destiny" packet it is priced in this packet, not indexed.)

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The impartation.

Something is hanging in the air over this people, he tells them — like a mother heavy with child, wanting to be delivered: the five-fold ministry, trying to fall. God spoke to him that afternoon, he says: tonight, in this conference, the literal offices will be imparted. Whoever has desired the office of a prophet is to lift their hands and cry to Jesus now — and the thing begins to fall: on the platform, on missionaries, in the balcony, in the choir loft. To one man he delivers a word received the night before — the mantle of an apostle is upon him; he will guide his organisation with apostolic power and authority as never before. With the new authority he sends them out of their comfort zones: go after somebody, pray for somebody you have never prayed for — people are being healed, tumours disappearing, deafness clearing, blind eyes opening. Whatever you ask in my name shall now be done, he declares over the waves of it (the ask-in-my-name wording is adapted to his present-tense charge and is priced in the packet). And it must be possessed, he insists — turn to a neighbour and claim it: God told Abraham he would give him all the land he walked upon, but he would have to possess it (the land promise as he tells it is a paraphrase whose attribution the packet records and does not adopt; it is priced, not indexed). He calls for the healing hands to rise all over the house — the gift of faith is here; he does not have to touch anyone or pray for anyone, Jesus is in the house — and then for those fighting a mental battle: lift your hands and worship, and be healed of the mental agony instantaneously. He closes the account with an Asia camp meeting where an angel took hold of a preacher's hands and rolled them in circles when the man felt nothing, and with one last healing unfolding as he speaks: a man whose arm something has taken hold of and lifted, the pain gone, the shortness of breath gone — and the house is sent to thank God with that man right there.

Summary scripture index: Mark 16:15-18 · Acts 2:17 · Ephesians 4:11-13 (3 entries).

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)