The Wilderness By Pass — Part 2

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 2 of 2. The sermon's first movement established the bypass: when the system will not carry God's word, God finds a man in the wilderness. Part 2 turns from the doctrine to the discipline — how a church already on the bypass gets a present word, proceeds with it, holds together, and waits out God's pace without selling its character. It closes with his charge to the generation that will inherit the church he helped build. (Part 1's span and this part's span are one continuous message — packet.md.)

Inquire of the Lord today.

Jehoshaphat would not go another step into battle until he knew the specific word of God for that day, and Tenney makes the king's request the conference's assignment: there is a word of God for today, and it has to be inquired for. Stale manna will not do — there is no microwave manna — and the greatest miracle in Deuteronomy is not opened eyes or raised dead but that God would speak to a man at all. Daniel's "multitude of his voice" becomes his test for the conference itself: when a multitude of leaders begins saying the same thing, God is trying to speak, and the focus has to shift from doing to hearing — because the more growth a church has, the more systems it builds, and the more time it can spend on the system instead of the Lord. A well blesses one man; a river touches everyone beyond him. The swamps — wide, big, and shallow — are the warning: God is after depth on one course, moving toward the sea.

Scriptures: 2 Chronicles 18:4; Deuteronomy 4:32-33

The proceeding word.

Jesus' sentence about bread becomes the movement's engine: God's people are marked by esteeming both the written word and the inspired word, and then proceeding with it. A word from the Lord is not for entertainment but for obedience; refuse to proceed with what God shows now, and no more of the proceeding word comes — the well stops up. He fears the church is sometimes building its own church and putting God's name on it, retelling the preacher who heard God ask for his church back: you start the service, you stop the service, you call it mine. David had to learn the same lesson with the ark — inspired, but carrying God's program on a new cart the book never authorised, while people got ground up in the process; obligation follows inspiration, and hope must be given before criteria. And a great conference is only measured by the next day: seven great conferences mean nothing against what happens after the people leave, so the question follows everyone home — did you leave your word in Alexandria, or did you proceed with it?

Called, not cornered.

The United Pentecostal Church stands at a crossroad with ten years to determine its destiny: settle into a comfortable denomination with velvet ruts, or become a dynamic force of evangelism — because the church is always one generation from extinction. The age works against it: a me generation, whose magazines have shrunk from Life to People to Self, and a church full of spectators, who never know the thrill of accomplishment and always end up jealous of the participants — Cain watching Abel. This is no day, he says, for one prayer, three songs, a twenty-minute sermon, and good night; the devil already knows all our old plays.

Boards in the same direction.

Against the critics — who always arrive after the battle to kill the wounded — he sets the ark: nothing but boards joined together, going the same direction, with a little pitch on them. Our whats will divide us; our who will unite us. Eschatology would blow the room apart like a lizard crossing plaid, so the uniting question is not what do you believe but in whom do you trust — and at that point the sermon rises into its creed: Jesus Christ is Lord, Jesus Christ is God, wholly and absolutely — in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth; and in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Patent-leather shoes, hog meat, Saturday or Sunday — Jesus is Lord over all of it. Unity, he insists, is not uniformity and not compromise: the test of love begins at the point of rejection, and a man's availability to unity is measured by how he reacts when he is misinterpreted and misunderstood.

Scriptures: John 1:1; John 1:14; Colossians 2:9

Room for the gifts.

God never intended spiritual leaders to be all things. The five-fold ministry is real — apostles, prophets, pastors, evangelists, teachers — and the body keeps breaking its own men by forcing them into roles they were never gifted for: the prophetic preacher crushed into administration, the tender shepherd driven out for not being a stem-winding evangelist and replaced by a human dynamo. Leaders must become secure enough in their own gift not to be threatened by others who succeed where they are weak — because only one has it all, as the visiting sister concluded after a sermon on the fullness of the Godhead: you folks believe Jesus is the whole cheese — the box the cheese came in, too.

Dreamers wait, and dreamers work.

If a dream is of God and its principles are followed, it comes true — but dreams have plateaus, and the first principle is waiting. Habakkuk could not reconcile his vision with his circumstances until God told him the vision was for an appointed time and to wait for it; Mary pondered instead of broadcasting; even Jesus, knowing at twelve who he was, submitted for years until the whisper came at the Jordan. The second principle is absorbing misunderstanding: visionaries live in a future that has already come true for them, and the best they can expect is friends who love them without ever hearing their drummer. Paul is the worked example, preached verse by verse: converted and preaching within days, lowered over the wall in a basket, three years in Arabia — the seminary of the Holy Spirit, a wilderness bypass — then roaring back into Jerusalem until the church shipped him home to Tarsus, and revival broke out the very day he left. Five years of tentmaking followed, then Antioch, and only after years of quiet work — ten years of being Saul before he became Paul — did the Spirit separate him for the work. The dream had not diminished; the maturity was in the waiting. And the third principle is work: the harder he works, the luckier he gets, and the unnamed home-missions pastors in the room — ten or fifteen people, no platform, no intimidation allowed — are the heroes on the front line.

Scriptures: Habakkuk 2:2-3; Acts 9:25; Acts 9:26; Acts 9:31; Acts 13:1-3; Galatians 1-2

The spiritual eunuch.

He concludes with the saying that has always intrigued him: the eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. A eunuch in both Testaments was the man to whom the bride was committed — to preserve her for the king, prepare her for the king's enjoyment alone, never attract her love to himself, never violate or manipulate her or grow rich off her. The church needs that spirit again: men who protect the bride, whose visibility is a sacred trust, who take the day's praise — great sermon, great superintendent — and hand it back as a sacrifice, because work for the Lord must never be confused with walk with the Lord, and a beautiful church built on the wrong motive can become a launching pad that sends up nothing but bottle rockets.

Scriptures: Matthew 19:12

Keeping the tree.

If the devil cannot get a man to backslide, he will get him to front-slide — so far out front on one truth that he loses communication with the body, because every truth has to be cross-centered. What he has preached, he confesses, comes out of his own bypass; he is still on it, still staggering, still leaning. But there was no such thing as an independent Israelite: every tribe belonged, each under its own standard, and a different flag across the way was no cause for irritation. He closes with Zacchaeus, who watered and dug around the old sycamore tree because it was from that tree he first saw Jesus — and with the old men of the movement, Lumpkin and Kilgore and Barnes, digging around their own tree: an eighty-miles-away block church on the wrong side of the tracks where a farm boy stumbled in forty-one years ago and heard something. The tree is not Jesus, he says, but as long as he lives he will take care of it. The younger preachers will inherit vineyards they did not plant and houses they could not build; his generation is on the western slope, struggling with one question — how to deliver this church, biblical and Pentecostal, into their hands — and he leaves it with theirs lifted.