The Key

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 1992 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Worship · Ministry and Calling · Salvation

The vision, and a phrase that appears twice.

Williams seats the congregation and goes straight to the text. He tells how God spared a prophet from a pot of burning oil and marooned him on an island to eavesdrop on the coming eternities, and then he voices John's Patmos vision at length in his own reading voice: John in the Spirit on the Lord's day, the voice as of a trumpet, the one like the Son of Man among the seven candlesticks, and the risen Christ laying his right hand on the fallen apostle — fear not, I am the first and the last, and I have the keys of hell and of death. From there he moves to the letters to the seven churches and stops at Philadelphia, where the Holy and True one is presented as holding a particular key. Fix your focus on that phrase, he tells the house: the key of David appears only twice in all the Bible — once in the letter, and once in Isaiah 22, which is the account he means to preach.

Scriptures: Revelation 1:9-18; Revelation 3:7-8

The impostor who locked up the treasury.

Isaiah's chapter opens on a city in panic — people on the housetops, rulers bound, a day of perplexity and treading down — and God quickly corners the culprit. The treasurer Shebna, keeper of the house and holder of the key of David, is an impostor: no lineage, no bloodline, a man who hewed himself a sepulchre to immortalise his name while the people he was supposed to feed were impoverished behind the lock he controlled. God's sentence runs through the sermon like a drumbeat: I am going to strip off your robe, take your girdle of strength, violently toss you like a ball, and give the authority, the power and the key to somebody born into the bloodline who understands the value of the treasure and will unlock it. Williams turns it without mercy on the pulpits of his own day — too many interlopers squatting on the treasury with powerless preaching, and a God who is about to rip the key out of hands that will not use it and put it in a hand that will.

Scriptures: Isaiah 22

Authority over ability, and the Christ who sat down.

The first thing God takes from Shebna is the robe — authority. Williams locates Luke 10:19 and works it word by word: read casually it promises power over serpents and scorpions; read carefully it gives authority over all the ability of the enemy, and there is a world between the two. The Christ who received that authority was no impostor and no coincidence — deity disguised as dust, God with eyebrows and kneecaps, the subject of sixty major prophecies with two hundred seventy ramifications, a statistical impossibility walking around in a body. Then Williams narrates the Nazareth synagogue: they handed him a book, he found the place, and he read the Spirit-of-the-Lord text aloud — good tidings to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, liberty to the bruised, the acceptable year of the Lord. And here is the verse nobody quotes, Williams says: he handed the book back and sat down, and in the Pauline epistles he is still sitting down, because he put the authority and the book in our hands. The signs that follow believers are voiced in the movement — devils cast out, hands laid on the sick — as the standing equipment of the people he sat down to watch work (the Mark 16:17-18 wording is priced in the packet, not indexed here).

Scriptures: Luke 10:19; Luke 4:18-19

The God who asked Job the questions.

Why should this authority be trusted? Because of who stands behind it. Job decided to interrogate God and got a glimpse of the force driving the universe, and Williams voices the interrogation at length: Who laid the foundations of the earth and its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together? Who shut up the sea with doors and told its proud waves how far they could come? Who commands the morning, holds the treasures of the snow and hail, sends the lightnings that answer, Here we are? That God went forth with his people, working with them and confirming the word. Against that backdrop the sentence on Shebna is re-read to its end: God takes the key of David off the impostor and lays it — not in a pocket, not on a belt, but on a shoulder, because the treasure is too vast to carry any other way — on the shoulder of Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. Whoever held that key did not merely have access to the treasure; he had authority to disperse it as he saw fit (the binding-and-loosing wording of Matthew 16:19 is voiced in this movement and priced in the packet, not indexed here).

Scriptures: Job 38

Five things the key opened.

The prefect of the palace held the key to five things, and Williams walks them in order. The palace, the king's presence — and the presence text is voiced entire, path of life, fullness of joy, pleasures for evermore (the promise that where two or three gather in his name he is in the midst is voiced alongside and priced in the packet). The fortress, Mount Zion: the name of the Lord is a strong tower — a verse whose middle the house itself supplies when he asks for it, which is why it is priced rather than indexed in the packet — and then Psalm 27 is voiced entire, the Lord my light and my salvation through to the sacrifices of joy in his tabernacle. The armory: the weapons of our warfare, mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds, with the story of the child king crowned from David's own stored swords after Athaliah had stripped the temple bare. The treasury itself, the unsearchable riches of Christ. And the banqueting house, the marriage supper of the Lamb, whose bride has made herself ready. Through this whole movement a large key is his visual argument; before it ends he is putting it into people's hands.

Scriptures: Psalm 16:11; Psalm 27:1-6; 2 Corinthians 10:4-5

Using the key: the weary and the sick.

"Carry my key. Just hold it on your shoulder" — and a hearer is holding it while he preaches on. When the weary come, the key opens the Isaiah rest text: precept upon precept, line upon line, the stammering lips and another tongue, this is the rest wherewith the weary are caused to rest — and then the Creator text for the faint, voiced entire: he giveth power to the faint, and they that wait upon the Lord renew their strength and mount up with wings as eagles. When the sick come, there is no ducking of heads: we are not healers, we are pray-ers, and the James text is voiced entire — call for the elders, anointing with oil in the name of the Lord, the prayer of faith that saves the sick. And behind the healing stands the suffering servant, with Isaiah expressly named as the sayer: who has believed our report, despised and rejected, wounded for our transgressions, and with his stripes we are healed.

Scriptures: Isaiah 28:10-12; Isaiah 40:28-31; James 5:14-15; Isaiah 53:1-5

Using the key: the sorrowing and the tempted.

For the sorrowing, the redeemed of the Lord returning with everlasting joy upon their heads and sorrow and sighing fleeing away — Tuesday joy, Thursday joy, Saturday joy — and the end of the story voiced with it: God wiping away all tears, no more death, neither sorrow nor crying nor pain. For the tempted — not the aunts and uncles of an easier day but the derelicts who now stagger in, since getting them converted is the easy part and making Christians of them is the job — he turns to Brother Anthony and the Wednesday-night case: no temptation has taken you but such as is common to man, and God is faithful to make a way of escape. Christ's own word for the tribulation of this world is sounded in the same breath — be of good cheer, I have overcome the world — and is priced in the packet rather than indexed here.

Scriptures: Isaiah 35:10; Revelation 21:4; 1 Corinthians 10:13

Using the key: the sinner.

The last and longest movement. Peter's blessing is voiced at length — begotten again to a lively hope, an inheritance incorruptible reserved in heaven, kept by the power of God through faith, rejoicing in heaviness because the trial of faith is more precious than gold — and Peter is then named for the word that the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation; many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. Psalm 103's mercy is voiced in a run: slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, sins removed as far as the east is from the west, a father pitying his children. And then the sermon's confession text, with John expressly named as the sayer before the wording is voiced entire — if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (it ships on the expressly-named contrast line, packet.md). Bishop Wagner is handed the key to hold while Ephesians 2 is voiced in two long runs: dead in trespasses and sins, quickened together with Christ, by grace saved through faith and that not of yourselves — and the Gentiles who were far off, aliens without hope and without God in the world, made nigh by the blood of Christ, no more strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. When the sinner comes into the sanctuary, Williams says, let's unlock the treasury of apostolic new birth salvation.

Scriptures: 1 Peter 1:3-8; 2 Peter 2:9; Psalm 34:19; Psalm 103:8, 10-14; 1 John 1:9; Ephesians 2:1-8; Ephesians 2:11-13, 19-20

What the key is.

He understands the messianic connotations of the key of David, Williams says at the end, but in a practical sense David's key is found in the hundred-fifty-chapter minefield of praise called the Psalms. Two located citations sound in the peroration in his glossed form — the psalm verse on triumphing in praise, and Colossians 2 on the enemy spoiled and triumphed over openly — and both are priced in the packet as the index's closest calls rather than indexed here. Then the picture he leaves with them: a Roman triumph, the conquering general riding before his stripped and chained foes while the crowds on the curb — no blood on their swords, no dents in their shields — become participants in the victory the moment they praise the victor. We triumph when we get on the curb. The key of David that unlocks the treasury, he says three times over, is praise: let this church break out in praise tonight and it will unlock healing, salvation, gladness, joy and victory. The recording closes in that praise, the preacher still calling the house to put the key in.

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Revelation 1:9-18 · Revelation 3:7-8 · Isaiah 22 · Luke 10:19 · Luke 4:18-19 · Job 38 · Psalm 16:11 · Psalm 27:1-6 · 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 · Isaiah 28:10-12 · Isaiah 40:28-31 · James 5:14-15 · Isaiah 53:1-5 · Isaiah 35:10 · Revelation 21:4 · 1 Corinthians 10:13 · 1 Peter 1:3-8 · 2 Peter 2:9 · Psalm 34:19 · Psalm 103:8, 10-14 · 1 John 1:9 · Ephesians 2:1-8 · Ephesians 2:11-13, 19-20

Scriptures: (none new in this movement)