Bring Brother Or You Will Not See My Face

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. The sitting general superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International preaches to a house full of young ministers on the one condition Joseph laid on his brothers: you will not see my face unless your brother is with you. The sermon turns that demand into a charge against every loveless, presumptuous, and judgment-happy habit in the ministry — God will not show His face to a church that will not go and fetch its brother.

Honouring the house that built the meeting

He opens in his own voice, thanking the Mangun family, elder and younger, and the Alexandria church for the prayer that fills its prayer rooms and sets the stage for everything that happens in the building; the meetings have exceeded their fondest expectations, he says, because the people who lead them truly love the Lord. He honours the preaching that went before his that night, and dwells on the fruit of the Alexandria ministry: endurance. A church whose prayer never stops, he says, is a church that will still be standing at the end.

Two texts, read standing

He announces his subject — bring your brother, or you will not see my face — and names his real fear for the movement: not its doctrine, which he loves every bit of, but the danger of guarding the doctrine while forsaking the commission to reach the lost. After prayer he has the house stand while he reads his texts aloud himself. From Peter: the Lord knows how to deliver the godly and to reserve the unjust, and the sin at the sermon's centre is presumption — speaking evil of dignities, overstepping bounds God has set. From Genesis: Judah repeating Joseph's solemn protest in Egypt — you shall not see my face except your brother be with you. That sentence becomes the sermon's refrain.

Scriptures: 2 Peter 2:9-11; Genesis 43:3

Love God gave for the whole world

He is convinced revival is coming, and he warns the preachers that a church can be doctrinally clean and spiritually debased at the same time. What revival requires is a love that is not a facade: a rich, full concern for one another, and beyond that a love for all mankind. Christ did not die for one fellowship alone; John, he says, put it beautifully — He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. There is a brotherhood of man, born of Adam, and the cross was impartial toward every part of it.

Scriptures: 1 John 2:2

Bitterness has no root here

There is no hate in the church of the living God, he says — then confesses his own. Growing up in his father's house he hated a man who had caused trouble in the church, and when the man came to the door one morning the boy slammed it in his face. His father made him bring the man in, sat him at the kitchen table, cooked his eggs the way he liked them, and blessed him until the man broke down weeping and asked forgiveness. That is the pattern the Joseph story teaches: the life of that family hung on bringing Benjamin to Joseph, and the promises to Abraham stood behind it. A love that covers wrongs, rather than cataloguing them, is the spirit God injects into His church.

Postpone judgment

Presumption is the sin of overstepping — speaking of people we do not know, in corners, in factions, tearing down God's children and then asking Him for revival. God plays no partiality with reputations: Moses was kept out of the promised land, David was exposed, Lucifer was cast down. He tells on himself: for a season he kept a written list in his wallet of everything one man in the church did against him, meaning to read it to him one day, until a service where everyone else was rejoicing showed him why he could not — the slip in his wallet. He tore it up and rejoiced with the rest. And it is not the preacher's business to put people in hell. All we have to say, he tells the young ministers, is God's message itself: repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the Holy Ghost. Three weeks earlier in Indianapolis he had preached not knowing his own son's father-in-law was in the audience — a man his son had been witnessing to for weeks — and at the invitation the man walked the aisle, pointed at him, and said: I know you didn't know I was here; God was talking through you.

Scriptures: Acts 2:38

Mercy in the stories

Jesus humiliated the religionists of His day with the story of the Samaritan who stopped for a man the priest and the Levite passed by — the outcast helped the outcast because he understood what an outcast was. A preacher who does not love the people of the church, he says flatly, should go drive a truck. He tells of a Brooklyn gambler God saved in his ungodliness and set on a rock. Then Jonah: a city flat on its face in repentance, a prophet on a hillside waiting for judgment that never came, and a God who had mercy on a people whose little ones could not tell their right hand from their left. Backsliders belong in the same sermon — there is a dragnet going out for them, and the church that resents their return has misunderstood its Lord, who stood in Joseph as a type: the hated brother risen to power, saving the very family that sold him.

When Job prayed for his friends

Bring me your brother, he repeats — if you do not have mercy on the brother and bring him to God, you will never see His face. Even Jesus looked at Judas and called him friend, knowing exactly what Judas would do within the hour. Then he calls on brother Kilgore to read, and the reading is performed in the hearing of the house, the reader sounding the text while Urshan answers and presses it home: the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends — the very friends who had heaped accusations on him were the ones he prayed for — and gave him twice as much as he had before, blessing his latter end more than his beginning, seven sons and three daughters restored to his house. In God's presence, he says, a man stops comparing himself to others and abhors his own envy and presumption instead.

Scriptures: Job 42:10-13

The close: a board that waited

The marriage banquet could not begin until the table was filled from the highways and byways; the prodigal's elder brother, who had stayed home all those years, is the warning to every pew-worn saint who resents the calf killed for the boy who came home. He quotes a dying man's will — the one thing more he wished he could give his family was faith in Jesus Christ — and confesses his own ledger of judgments he wishes he could call back. Then his closing testimony, told as a constant warning: a preacher brought before one of the movement's boards, accused of adultery on evidence so strong it appeared he was guilty. The man sat with the sweetest spirit and said, brethren, do your duty — God will vindicate me. Even his wife, harassed by phone calls until she was nearly driven out of her mind — they had threatened to kill their children, to bomb their house — could only say she did not know. The board postponed judgment. A year later the accuser himself came begging the preacher's forgiveness: his wife had lied. Urshan thanks God for sense enough to postpone judgment so an innocent man was not placed in a position of guilt, and he brings the whole house to its feet on the sermon's own terms: open your hearts, ask God to help you bring your brother, so that we can see His face — I want to see His face, I want to see the glory of His power, the majesty of His greatness.