This really struck me strongly today. If you've been watching the news at all, it hasn't been raining in Florida for quite a while. We're believing that June two summers ago the homosexuals flew their flag over the city hall of the city of Orlando and it stopped raining. And that's biblical, the Lord withdraws the rain from a land where he has taken His presence. The first sign that God has stepped away from a land is that He has withdrawn the rain. And we've had more rain in the last fifteen hours than in the last fifteen months and I'm believing that it's because the Lord has assembled a body of people here tonight... [applause].
Now Ken asked me obviously to talk about worship and I guess that's what I know about. I honored to do that. I'm believing that when I go to something like this (a conference) I want to come away from it understanding something more than I did when I got there. I'm believing that that's why you're here. I'm believing that that's why everyone is here. I'm hoping and have been praying in the Lord that I would be able to share some revelation with you. I know a lot of you are probably a part of very strong worshipping congregations.
We've stumbled upon, by the grace of God I believe, a focus, a goal; a direction for worship. Not an abstract expression of individual love but a collective body experience, and I'm going to go into that in a little bit more detail. I want to start off by saying that we found about a year, a year and a half ago, again by the grace of the Lord, some video tapes and some audio tapes by a gentleman by the name of Ray Hughes. And if you're familiar with him, he does tremendous talks on.....he spent fifteen hours on what I'm hopin' to spend thirty minutes on tonight, so we're just gonna scratch the surface. If fact, his fifteen hours just scratched the surface. We were amazed to find after we went through everything that Ray has to say that we already were doing everything that Ray found. And the Lord had led us into it and it was very nice to find someone speaking confirmation to us of what we'd already been led into. Ray, however, isn't too quick to let you know that he got all of his resources out of this book. And if you really would like to look into it a little more deeply I'll share this with you. It's a phenomenal book but it's very scholarly, and very difficult reading. But if you can get through. . . . . It makes the bible look . . . ya know. . . like you just wanna sit there and read it for hours compared to this. If you can't sleep at night pull this one out. [laughter] It'll have you out in less than ten minutes. ("The Tabernacle of David" by Kevin J. Conner-City Bible Publishing)
Let's turn please to Revelation. Believe it or not, were gonna turn to Revelation chapter 2 in your bible. And were gonna take a look at some scripture here. An awful lot of the things that are stated in the scripture about worship are not all that profoundly out there in front of your face for you to see and understand. Specifically were gonna jump down to verse 12. This is where we begin to speak to the church a Perganum.
And to the angel at the church at Perganum write. . ." now you understand that word "angel" there is really referring to the pastor of that congregation. And I'm not going to belabor that, but we really are talking about a person that the Lord has hand selected. . . and they should be someone that the Lord hand selected and put in that position of authority. That's not the authority to "lord" it over other people. And Jesus talked about that. That's the authority to clean the toilets, and encourage everyone to worship the Lord. Ken often says, and this is too true, his job is to make sure that Jesus is worshipped, and that Jesus alone is worshipped; nobody else. And everything else falls by the wayside when that's the particular focus. O.K. So we're speaking to the angel at the church at Perganum. "The one who has the sharp two edged sword says this: I know where you dwell. Where Satan's throne is. And you hold fast my name and did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas, my witness, my faithful one who was killed among you where Satan dwells" he says that frequently doesn't he? "But I have a few things against you because you have there some who hold to the teachings of Balaam who kept teaching Balack to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality."
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