Choose Your Destiny

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 1989 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Salvation · Holy Ghost · Healing and Miracles

Lee Stoneking — introduced by the host and received with applause (both seamed out of the span, packet.md) — opens the night service himself, leading the house in praise before he reads. His announced subject is a question he has the congregation repeat with him — what will my destiny be — and the message is his answer: the church's destiny is settled, the devil's destiny is settled, but a person's destiny is chosen, day by day, and the new birth puts the choosing in his hands. He promises at the outset that there will be a massive healing in the place that night, and the recording closes with him leading exactly that.

The word that cannot return void.

His text is Isaiah 55, read aloud: the rain and snow that come down from heaven and water the earth, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater — so shall God's word be that goes forth out of his mouth; it shall not return to him void, but shall accomplish what he pleases and prosper in the thing whereto he sent it. On that word the whole message stands: what God sends out does its work, and what a man gives himself to, he becomes.

Scriptures: Isaiah 55:10-11

Predestined church, chosen destiny.

This church, he says, was predestinated by God in his divine providential plan — somebody somewhere will serve the Lord, and it will go on whether or not we are part of it. The devil's destination is likewise predestinated, and it is all one direction: down. Quoting what another preacher said of Lucifer — begun in the holy mount of God, thrown down for rebellion, to be thrown down again in the tribulation, down into the bottomless pit for the millennium, and at last down into the lake of fire — the devil is on his way down, but this church is on its way up. The individual, though, has a will of his own: a man can mold his own destiny day by day. What a man is today is what he thought yesterday; what he will be tomorrow is what he thinks of himself today — the sermon's thesis sounds here in the wording of Proverbs, "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" (priced in the packet, not indexed). The thing you give your time, energy and attention to is the thing you will become: give yourself to clowning and you become a clown, to intellect and you become intellectual, to athletics and an athlete — but give yourself to this man called Jesus, seek him, and you will become like him.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement — its wordings are priced in the packet)

Born again breaks the line.

Psychologists, then and now, say mankind is a product of heredity and environment; he was taught it in Bible college, and he does not believe it. For the man on the street it may be true, but if you have been to water in the name of Jesus Christ and filled with the baptism of the Holy Ghost, speaking with tongues, your past is gone — old things are passed away (the new-creation wording sounds here, priced in the packet). You can break a heredity factor; you can change your mentality and your personality; where you came from cannot touch you if you hold on to your born-again experience. Jesus himself came out of Nazareth, whose reputation made the Pharisees curl their lips — and his environment did not touch him. Stoneking's own father was an alcoholic until the last few years of his life; by the psychologists' rule the son should have been one too, and he simply refused: "I will not be an alcoholic." The night before, this same conference had heard Jeff Arnold's story of a life lived in the streets of New York — the elite of society would have written him off as a reject — and here he stood as proof there is a way to shape your own destiny. It does not matter who your father was, or how many rascals are in your heredity line: when you have spoken with tongues, you have all the heritage you are ever going to need in this present world. You are a child of the King.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The cousin who changed his destiny on his deathbed.

He tells of a distant cousin — one of those distant kinds nobody wanted to know much about — a man who had done everything in the book, unmentionable things, until the life he had lived took its toll and he lay dying in a hospital, the staff saying he would be dead before dawn. Stoneking's mother, a saint of the most high God, heard where he was and went to him in the late afternoon. She sat by the bed and witnessed to him: she could not give him the Holy Ghost, she said, but he had to repent — genuinely repent of everything. After about an hour she left. As night came on, the dying man, with what strength he had, crawled out of the bed and knelt on the hospital floor and went back to his childhood, telling God everything he had ever done — hours of it, past nine, past ten, past midnight, weeping. In the wee hours of the morning he crawled back into the bed, and when the nurses came they found him lying on his back with his hands raised to the ceiling, talking in languages they had never heard and could not understand — and he breathed his last breath still speaking in them. On the weight of a simple testimony, that man changed the course of his destiny. And you can change yours, Stoneking says — but you have got to decide how much of God you want, and how much of yourself you are willing to give.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

A God who can be talked out of it.

Time and again God said he would destroy Israel, and repented. Jonah declared Nineveh would be destroyed in forty days — Jonah would have let them burn, for the sake of his prophecy — but when God saw the king of Nineveh crawl off his throne and bring even the dogs and cats in sackcloth and ashes, he repented of the evil he had thought to do. God spoke to Moses face to face, as a man talks to his friend, and said he would wipe the Hebrew children out — but he went to Moses because he knew Moses would talk him out of it, and wanted to be talked out of it; and Moses did, and God backed off. If Moses, a man of like passions, could change the heart of God, we can do it. So with Josiah: a child king heard the word of the Lord read, and rent not only his garments but his heart, and God said the curse would yet fall — but not in Josiah's lifetime, not until he had been gathered to his fathers. Stoneking turns that prayer on his own country: in the living room of his own apartment one day, looking at the peril of this present hour, he wept and told God that if he heard the voice of Josiah he was obligated to hear his — God bless America, give us a revival from shore to shore and border to border, withhold the wrath, let our children be raised in freedom. There is no hope without revival; revival is the answer to everything — this Holy Ghost is the answer to demonology and cultism and the ills of this world, for greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world (the wording sounds here as the movement's proof, priced in the packet). And then David: the law executed many times over, and Nathan the prophet walking in to point his finger — David, thou art the man. David slipped from the throne, took the crown from his head, and lowered himself to the floor with the groan only a penitent soul can know — and God himself stepped out from behind the law, pushed the law behind him, stooped over his shepherd boy and whispered, Thou shalt not die. He broke his own laws for David. It is not how you begin that counts, and not what happens in between; it is how you end. Samson went down — but he slew more in his death than in his life.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

How do you fight this?

Nobody can keep you from getting all of God that you want: nobody can stop you praying all night, speaking with tongues till the rising of the sun, dancing, shouting, studying the word from morning till night. And how do you fight this Jesus? How do you fight a man who steps to the bow of a little ship and says to an anguished storm, Peace, be still — a man who tells a man on a stretcher, Thy sins be forgiven thee, and the man rolls up his bed and walks home — a man who stands at a friend's tomb four days dead and names him, Lazarus, because if he had just said "come forth" the whole resurrection would have come parading out (the dominical clauses of this catena are priced as a set in the packet). How do you fight somebody who doesn't bother to knock, but sits down at your table and says he's going to have lunch with you? You don't fight the Pentecostals you are among tonight: in the middle of the night, trying to sleep, you'll hear them singing and preaching; on your way to work there'll be angels sitting on the hood of your car, tapping you on the shoulder. You can't fight what you can't see. It has already been determined — we are the winner. Exactly what do you do with an empty wheelchair, when the victim is running down the aisle screaming, "I can walk, I've been healed"? He has seen nine people get out of wheelchairs in the last two years — not a lot, but a beginning. What does the doctor do when this x-ray shows it and this x-ray doesn't? You do nothing with that, because you can't. And now, he says, God is allowing this church to mold her own destiny: this conference is a conference of destiny, eternal destiny — something has been born here that will never die, and there is no way to kill it.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The chariot of revival.

He has been in Pentecost twenty-five years, UPC, back to the end-time revival days in New York State when Brother Pugh came and taught them and nobody knew they existed — and they got sidetracked with some miserable issues, and the revival died. But now they are not hoping at the threshold; they are walking through it, into the greatest, most earth-shaking revival this world has ever known. About twelve or fifteen years ago, in the home of some people who feared God, they sat at dinner — roast beef and brown gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans and corn — talking about Jesus; and he came, as he does when you talk about him. They got to weeping around that table; the word of Jesus about having meat to eat that his disciples knew not of sounded among them (priced in the packet); the chairs were pushed back, the food got cold, and out of it there came a message in tongues and an interpretation. He has heard many interpretations in twenty-five years and forgotten most of them, but this one he has never forgotten and never will: God said he was sending the chariot of revival into the earth, and nothing or no one would stop it, because the wheels of the chariot had been oiled with the oil of the Holy Ghost. (Those are the interpretation's words as he recalls them — reported speech from that night, not his own text, packet.md.) Stoneking began to sob, and as best he knew how, he climbed into the chariot: "Jesus, whatever you do, don't ever let me be shaken out of this chariot, no matter how rough the ride gets." Nobody and nothing is ever going to stop this move of God that has begun now — because this one has been oiled with the oil of the Holy Ghost.

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)

The healing ministry.

Revival is here, he cries — from the balcony to the floor, from the right to the left, from the ceiling to the floor — and the service breaks into a long stretch of worship and music (roughly 38:22–43:27, carried in the span as it stands in the recording). Then he takes up the promise he made at the open. There are men on this platform receiving the gifts of the Spirit in their ministry; the gift of faith is here; angels are dispatched among the people to heal every disease and every affliction; in the balcony there is a sweep going across — you are healed as easily as you feel him. There is a mass healing in this place: tumors disappearing, cancer being healed right now in Jesus' name. He will preach no farther, because he doesn't have to — people need to begin to minister to each other: lay your hands on people near you, climb over the pews and go after them, climb the stairs in the balcony and lay hands on people there. Over in one corner, he says, there is muscular dystrophy — as he names it — and there are two children there; somebody is to go to them and lay hands on them in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. One of the children he commands by name, three times over — [name redacted] — "I command you to be healed in the name of Jesus." (The child is a minor, present and being ministered to; the name is withheld here in every form — 3 markers, packet.md.) He commands a back to be healed; one is being healed right there, another right there — and the final caption breaks off mid-phrase, the ministry still running as the recording ends.

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Isaiah 55:10-11

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)