Jesus

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 1988 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Jesus Name · Faith · Healing and Miracles

Lee Stoneking — introduced by the host as a man whose ministry is faith, and prayed over before he takes the pulpit (both seamed out of the span, packet.md) — preaches a night message whose whole argument is carried in its one-word title: the name of Jesus was withheld from the old covenant, given to the church at Pentecost, and placed in believers' hands as a power of attorney — not to be begged with, but to be used. Everything in the span is Stoneking's own voice, from his opening text to the healing ministry he leads at the close.

The name nobody knew.

He opens in Isaiah 52 and reads the promise that God's people shall know his name — the name Israel did not have. The old covenant knew God as Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, Shalom, and finally only as Hashem, "the Name," because the name itself had never been divulged — not even to Abraham, the friend of God. Then John 16:24, read and pressed: they had asked nothing in his name because they had never known it. After four hundred years of silence the name was announced at Bethlehem and given, not to the world, but to the church.

Scriptures: Isaiah 52:6; John 16:24

Power of attorney.

The name's authority was won at the cross: Jesus spoiled principalities, paralysed the one who held the power of death, and took the keys of death and hell — a victory Stoneking dramatises at length as Jesus demanding the keys in hell's throne room, a retelling he expressly offers as his own conviction rather than a text (packet.md). What the risen Jesus holds, he handed over: to use the name is to act as Jesus himself acting, a signed check on heaven's resources, a deed and abstract the church possesses whether or not it has read them. God will defend that name for his own sake (Ezekiel 36:22), and the believer's standing in it is present-tense: as he is, so are we in this world.

Scriptures: Colossians 2:15; Ezekiel 36:22; 1 John 4:17; Mark 16:17-18; Matthew 16:18

Living in the name.

The centurion of Matthew 8 is the model: a man under authority who recognised authority, and asked Jesus only to speak the word. The early church lived that way — praying, healing, casting out demons, baptising, worshipping, all in the name — and Stoneking works the roll of citations (packet.md prices the list as a set) before landing on Peter at the gate Beautiful, who did not stop to beg God for the lame man but commanded him up in the name: such as I have. Then the confession: for twenty-four years Stoneking himself prayed the begging way, and only in the last few months stopped asking for what was already deposited in the bank. He pictures it from his own life — his mother recently dead, he held her power of attorney and wrote checks in her name unquestioned, as if she herself had walked into the bank; how much more the church, married into the name and all it carries.

Scriptures: Matthew 8:5-13; Acts 3:1-8

God forbid we lose it.

The danger is a church more hungry in the pews than in the pulpit: Hezekiah found the priests out of their places and raised a revival with the Levites, and God hearkened and healed the people — God forbid the people be found more righteous than the priests in this hour. From Bible school days he retells Sister Norris's story of the elderly saint who, ambushed on her way to church, cried out in Jesus' name and the robber fell dead without a mark on him. The threatened apostles of Acts 4 prayed in the name for signs and wonders and filled Jerusalem with the doctrine until everybody was talking about repentance, baptism in Jesus' name, and the Holy Ghost. The name is the believer's weapon, what the rod was in Moses' hand — and a church stripped of it is Samson blind and staggering.

Scriptures: Acts 4:24-30

The gift of faith.

The close is practice, not theory. That same morning, after Sister Mangan's message, he commanded a preacher dying of emphysema to live and pastor his church, and commanded cancer out of an aged man — commanded, not asked. In a revival service a devil-possessed man who stormed down the aisle ran out when Stoneking spoke to the devil in the name. In a Schenectady hospital he sang the name over an unconscious three-year-old girl found face-down in a pool, and her convulsions stopped and her eyes opened. And in meetings one Sunday night he climbed over the end of a pew to pray with a woman who had given up hope on the eve of her breast-cancer surgery — commanding, not asking — and when the surgeon opened her the next day, he told her the cancer he had diagnosed was simply not there. In Brother Haney's meetings he watched the gift of faith heal hundreds without a hand laid on them, and a preacher's leg grow out as he walked past. The gift of faith, he teaches, is what God does without us — angels, ministering spirits, stand in this very conference waiting to be released — and after sounding Joel's charge to blow the trumpet in Zion and call a solemn assembly, he turns the house loose: lay hands on the person next to you, in the name of Jesus. The healing ministry runs in his own voice to the end of the recording. (The morning's two men, the woman healed the night before her cancer surgery, and the child are all unnamed in the message and stand unnamed here; the closing movement indexes no new scripture — the signs wording that sounds inside it rides with the Mark 16 entry above, packet.md.)

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Isaiah 52:6 · John 16:24 · Colossians 2:15 · Ezekiel 36:22 · 1 John 4:17 · Mark 16:17-18 · Matthew 16:18 · Matthew 8:5-13 · Acts 3:1-8 · Acts 4:24-30

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)