The Wilderness By Pass — Part 1

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 1990 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: The Church · Ministry and Calling · Christian Living

Part 1 of 2. T. F. Tenney, Louisiana's district superintendent and forty-one years a preacher, opens the 1990 Because of the Times with a confession: he has left many conferences with the letters "Y.B." written under his notes — yes, but how? Obligation follows inspiration, and the church keeps collecting inspiration it does not know how to carry. His text is the third chapter of Luke, and his subject is the road God builds when the official road will not carry his word: the wilderness bypass. (The host's introduction is seamed out; the span is Tenney's voice from his opening words to the close of the sermon's first movement — packet.md.)

Yes, but how.

He declines the peer pressure of a great meeting — a preacher's reputation does not intimidate him, and he is not preaching for response, because a preacher who preaches for response ends up worshipping his response. First, though, he does the district's business like a pastor: the Louisiana camp meeting with Billy Cole and Jeff Arnold, the men's conference, and general conference coming to New Orleans with an all-day prayer meeting to open it — his generation, he says, is the last one living that actually worked with the founding fathers, and he has written a history of Louisiana Pentecost so this generation stays tied to its heritage.

Scriptures: Joshua 3:4

The text.

He has the house open Luke's third chapter and reads it himself: in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, with Pontius Pilate governing Judea, Herod and Philip and Lysanias tetrarchs, and Annas and Caiaphas holding the high priesthood — the word of God came to none of them. It came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness, and John came preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Then he has the congregation stand and pray, and introduces his subject: the wilderness bypass.

Scriptures: Luke 3:1-3

A bypass around the system.

Draw the same list in his own day — the years of this superintendent and that one, the famous names of the fellowship — and the sentence still reads the same: the word of the Lord bypassed them all and found one voice in the wilderness. He is blunt about why. Annas and Caiaphas should have received the word; the temple was the institution God designed to receive revelation, and politics had its Caesar and its Herod. But a structure that is not open and fluid to God's move will be passed by, and God will build a bypass in the wilderness to get his message to its location. Every believer, he says, has a bypass somewhere — in his history, in his present, or in his future — and the wilderness, though it is not the fast lane, is where God prepares a voice that can announce the Messiah. John got more than his father's priestly name in the wilderness; his actions added to his name, and his accent fell where it had to fall: repentance, baptism, holiness — preached without the granddaughter clause, the quiet exemption that arrives when the sin a man has preached against all his life shows up in his own family.

Wilderness men.

The bypass is crowded with the Bible's great names. Abram came off it known as the friend of God; Moses met the burning bush on it, herding another man's sheep; Gideon saw an angel by an empty winepress; Elijah, praying to die under a juniper tree, got a fresh commission there; Philip ran into the Ethiopian eunuch on it; Saul of Tarsus spent nearly three years on it in Arabia. The point is not the place but the hearing: if the established structure cannot be the vehicle for God's word, God finds a man in the wilderness — and if the men in the structure cannot be used, they will be replaced. Revivals do not come through organizations; they come to them. Samuel, the man of the temple, proves the rule from the other side: the wilderness is not a physical place but an attitude of the heart, and what matters is that somebody, inside the structure or out of it, captures a present word from the Lord — a voice, not an echo.

The test of character.

Jesus himself was made on the bypass: led by the Spirit into the wilderness, tempted the whole forty days, and coming out in the power of the Spirit — the wilderness intensified his relationship with the Father. A man is tempted according to his worth to the kingdom; Jesus was offered the whole world because he was worth it, and a man who sells his ministry for a passing lust was not worth much to begin with. The temptations are ordinary — pride, kingdom-building, money, status, the television preached against at the conference and watched half the night in the motel room — and the only witness who matters is the one who already knows. Tenney fears losing the mission more than losing doctrine or standards, because a church can keep its function and lose its mission entirely; and against the church's questions for God he sets God's questions for the church — 184 of them to Job, against Job's 181 — ending with the plainest one: why don't you get back to the basics?

Leaning on the beloved.

The wilderness can be a wonderful place, because there God speaks comfortably — speaks his heart — to the one he has allured away from the distractions of Egypt. Out of that picture comes the sermon's tenderest image: a figure stumbling up out of the wilderness, leaning on the breast of her beloved. That leaning is dependence and trust, and Tenney claims it for himself in front of the whole conference: a superintendent coming out of the wilderness not yet out, strength gone, leaning heavy on his beloved — able to get a word for other people more easily than a word for himself, while five billion people wait for the greatest thing on earth and the church substitutes doing for being.

Scriptures: Hosea 2:14; Song of Solomon 8:5

The voice of one.

He closes the movement with John's own answer to the priests. He does not have the house turn to the passage; he tells it — who are you, are you Christ, are you Elijah, are you a prophet — until the answer strips everything else away: I am the voice of one. John could have claimed the prophet's title, and Jesus himself said he carried Elijah's spirit, but in the wilderness his identity had been consumed by the burden until his voice and God's voice were one track. Against that surrendered identity Tenney sets the philosophy of hell — spare yourself — spoken to Jesus by Peter and answered with a rebuke; heaven's philosophy is the God who spared not his own son. And Joseph, who refused a proposition he had first honestly considered, teaches the movement's last lesson: the moment nearest defeat is the moment of greatest victory, character is measured by what a man would do if he knew he would never be found out, and God — who is committed to character, not talent — works that character out on the wilderness bypass.

Scriptures: John 1:19-23