Jesus Loves You

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 1994 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA · conference session (night session)

Topics: Ministry and Calling · Faith · Christian Living

Summary in original words, built from the stored caption capture read transiently (summary-form packet; packet.md carries the settlements). Scripture references are indexed only where he cites them; passages he tells without citing are flagged as told in place and are not indexed. One name is redacted throughout under the minors rule (see packet.md, Flag 10).

A simple man's gift

He opens at Christmas. Tucked in his attic is the best gift he ever received — an electric train given him when he was nine years old, still running, not for sale. In his Austin church there is a simple man, Gilbert, of limited understanding, whom Johnson loves; of such a man, he says, the Bible speaks when it speaks of the Lord preserving the simple (voiced wording, priced in packet.md, not indexed). Two weeks before Christmas Gilbert brought him a homemade gift: three plaques chained together spelling out the words "Jesus loves you." Johnson, buried in finer gifts, folded it away under his office couch — until a few days after Christmas, when Gilbert came back in distress to confess he had stolen the plaque and had to return it or go to jail. Johnson dug it out, gave it back, and assured the man his love did not depend on the plaque. The stolen gift becomes the sermon's seed: Johnson will play Gilbert to this congregation and leave them the same three words, hung where they will see them — and unlike Gilbert, he is not coming back to take them away.

Scriptures: (none cited in this section)

Three words for the wall

The three words will work, he promises, in the desert, in the valley, in the cold, when everything is against you. He reinforces them with a hymn he quotes at length — the song whose words, as the story is told, were found written on an asylum wall, picturing all the oceans turned to ink and every man a scribe, still unable to write out the love of God (a published hymn, performed; see packet.md). Then he performs a celebrated set-piece describing Christ — made by God and not by ourselves, supreme and preeminent, King of kings and Lord of lords, whom Pilate could not fault and the grave could not hold (performed set-piece; a psalm wording sounds inside it, priced in packet.md, not indexed). The refrain lands again and again through the night: Jesus loves you.

Scriptures: (none cited in this section)

Walking in Ezekiel's shoes

Ezekiel is his pattern for the preacher of this hour: a priest's son, a captive in Babylon at thirty, called among people who had hung their harps on the willows by the river and said they could not sing in a strange land (told, not indexed) — yet a man who received a vision of God anyway (the vision chapter is told, priced in packet.md, not indexed). We fit Ezekiel, Johnson argues, more than any other major prophet. And the first thing that must happen to walk in his shoes is in Ezekiel's third chapter: the preacher must eat the book — the whole roll, down into the bowels, nothing trimmed away with a penknife, not even the parts that cut; he names his own loves inside the whole counsel, separation preaching among them, and warns that a man must love receiving preaching as much as giving it, for the eaten book is honey in the mouth.

Scriptures: Ezekiel 3

The right spirit

The second thing is the right spirit, and Ezekiel's eighth chapter shows what the wrong one looks like: the hole in the wall, the chamber of imagery, seventy elders each trying to out-cense the other instead of binding hearts together, women weeping for an idol in the house of God, young men between the porch and the altar with their backs to the temple, worshipping the sun — loving the world, in whose heart the love of the Father is not (voiced wording, priced in packet.md, not indexed). Bitterness, jealousy and emulation in the platform leak into the pews; a man cannot teach a good spirit he does not have. He tells of Joseph's brothers, all piety in their father's house and treachery in the field (told, not indexed), and of David, whose mentality killed the lion and the bear rather than suffer them to live (told, not indexed) — so some things must not be let live: bitterness, malice, strife, the roaring lion that is never domesticated (a fragment sounds here, priced in packet.md, not indexed). Then he voices the apostolic charge entire, as what the Bible said — let all bitterness and wrath and evil speaking be put away, and be kind and tenderhearted, forgiving as God for Christ's sake has forgiven (voiced entire, priced in packet.md, not indexed) — and lands on the one citation he names outright: in malice be children, but in understanding be men.

Scriptures: Ezekiel 8; 1 Corinthians 14:20

In malice be ye children

The citation opens his proof. Days earlier, preaching for a fellow pastor, he watched the pastor's young son, [name redacted], receive the Holy Ghost at the altar, talking in tongues — and keep on talking in tongues: into the church office, where [name redacted] said his good-nights still in that language while his father held him, and into the back seat of the Johnsons' car, where [name redacted], asked what he wanted at the drive-in window, answered in tongues until his father gently told him this world does not understand that language — whereupon [name redacted] ordered chicken nuggets, french fries and a Coke, and pronounced it joy unspeakable. The child's name is withheld under the minors rule (packet.md, Flag 10); the story is Johnson's exhibit that every believer can become a child tonight — that 1994 does not have to repeat 1993 and 1992.

Scriptures: (none new in this section)

Prejudice has got to die

He gives the house homework instead of a text: read Genesis 9 for yourselves, he says (the reading is assigned, not performed; see packet.md). The teaching he has heard all his life — that Ham was cursed for his skin — is a lie, he says flatly: the curse as written fell on Canaan, for a moral failure and not for a color, and a black man is God's kid exactly as a white man or a brown man is. Prejudice has got to die — and he and the black brother beside him seal it by dancing together before the house.

Scriptures: (none cited in this section)

Handle crisis: get up and preach again

The third thing is crisis, and Ezekiel's twenty-fourth chapter is its school: the prophet's wife died between morning and evening, and the word of the Lord to him was to get up and preach again. Johnson preaches it out of his own life. On March 13, 1981, he lost his wife; their four-year-old son died with her. Two days later, on a Sunday night in Dallas, his superintendent preached the memorial to a packed house — and then gave an altar call, and called the grieving father forward, and ordered him to lay hands on the seekers. Johnson obeyed, weeping, and everyone who came to that altar received the Holy Ghost. (The boy is Johnson's own child, told by his father; the parent exception is noted in packet.md.) Thirteen years on he is still answering trials the same way — most recently his own brother's suicide in October 1992, when the superintendent's old command came back to him on a Wednesday night: get up, boy. Some in the house, he says, have quit-itis; it is time to quit quitting.

Scriptures: Ezekiel 24

Preach, preach, preach

The fourth thing is simply to preach. He has the Bible brought, turned to Ezekiel 37, and a brother — Williams, as the captions name him — reads the valley of dry bones aloud at his direction, in instalments, Johnson breaking in with his own fire: the hand of the Lord on the prophet, the bones very many and very dry, the question whether they can live, and the command to prophesy to them. His own narration finishes the chapter's story: the noise, the shaking, the bones coming together, the army standing up — God will give a man a church if he preaches with the right spirit. Between the reading and the narration rides a story: the cowboy who was the only man at church, who told the discouraged preacher that if one cow shows up you feed it — but not the whole load. This congregation, Johnson says, is not cattle but sheep, and he means to preach the whole load anyway.

Scriptures: Ezekiel 37:1-4

The river and the A

He closes Ezekiel where the prophet's last vision runs: twenty-two years later, brought back to the house of God, a man with a measuring line leads him out a thousand cubits at a time — waters to the ankles, to the knees, to the loins, then waters to swim in (told, not indexed; the chapter is never named in his speech — see packet.md). That, he says, is end-time revival, and God wants to give this church a revival of huge proportions. Then the grace story: an Austin Baptist pastor friend of his took a Greek class from a professor who had never given an A — until the year he announced the grade was already in the book for everyone who had enrolled, and his students, freed from the fear of failure, learned more Greek than any class before them. So it is with grace: the wording he voices for it — saved by grace through faith, not of yourselves, the gift of God (voiced, priced in packet.md, not indexed) — means the house leaves tonight with an A on the report card. His final charge gathers the whole sermon: preach, preach, preach — with the right spirit, the whole word of God — and lift up your hands: Jesus loves me.

Summary scripture index (the exact union of the sections above): Ezekiel 3 · Ezekiel 8 · 1 Corinthians 14:20 · Ezekiel 24 · Ezekiel 37:1-4

Scriptures: (none new in this section)