Let My People Go! | Miracles and the Power of God - Session 2 | Ken Fish

This first comment I'm going to make, um, is a little bit off topic from what I intend to speak on this morning. But having said that, that as a disclaimer, I just want to piggyback on something Jeffrey was sharing.

In the book of Exodus, um, the Lord speaks to Moses, chapter 8, and he says, "Then the Lord said to Moses, 'Go in to Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me.'"

Now, this thing, "serve," that sounds like, you know, what we think of like, "Go teach a Sunday school class," or I don't know, "Go witness on a street corner," or whatever it is. But this word actually means to worship. To serve the Lord is to worship Him, and to worship Him is to serve Him.

And so the story goes on in chapter 8, and in verse 28, Pharaoh said, "I will let you go to sacrifice to the Lord your God in the wilderness; only you must not go very far away." Well, just 'cause he doesn't want them to run away, right? I mean, he's no fool. He's talking about his entire work force. That is their, you know, their slave labor. We're not going to get in a discussion about slave slavery here, other than to say that in the ancient world, it was kind of a thing. In our modern world, at least we give lip service to the idea that it's not allowed, although there are plenty of places in the world where people are still enslaved.

But Moses had said to Pharaoh, "Well, let's back up further. Verse 25, Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, 'Go, sacrifice to your God within the land,' meaning, stay within the boundaries of Egypt." And Moses said, "It would not be right to do so, for the offerings we shall sacrifice to the Lord our God are an abomination to the Egyptians. If we sacrifice offerings abominable to the Egyptians before their eyes, will they not stone us? We must go three days' journey into the wilderness and sacrifice to the Lord our God as he tells us."

And that's when Pharaoh says, "I will let you go sacrifice, but you must not go very far away." In other words, three days is too far.

So what do we to take, take away from this? Well, Jeffrey was saying, "Let's enter in." Um, worship is the main thing. Um, the preaching of the word is important, but it's not the main thing. And, you know, there's there's a, I think, a really important lesson embedded in this just handful of verses we've looked at out of Exodus. And the primary one is is that our main ministry to the Lord is actually worship.

And the thing that had to happen was for them to break away from their main environment. We could say their context, if you want to use a slightly more theological term. But they had to break away from their main environment. Why? Well, because they were so immersed in the flow of life in their slavery, but in, you know, getting up every morning and making breakfast and kind of the ebb and flow of life, albeit as slaves. But but they still had to carry on. They certainly weren't being catered to by the Egyptians.

And, you know, one of the things that can happen to all of us is we get caught into the, um, hurly-burly of life, and we don't actually enter into the zone with the Lord. And one of the things that I really remember well, and we were talking last night, way later than probably we should have been, but I was thinking of the Vineyard movement because that was kind of my main context. But I could think back further to Calvary Chapel and the Jesus Revolution. Like I mentioned, I, I knew Lonnie, I traveled with him for a bit. Um, and I remember kind of the, the tail end of the Jesus Revival. It was happening just up the road from where I lived. And I had friends in high school who, you know, cajoled me to come with them to go attend meetings at what we call BC, Big Calvary, at the tent. And so, um, I remember both of these movements, the Calvary Chapel movement, Jesus Revolution movement, as well as the Vineyard. And then Jeffrey was talking about being at Toronto. And a really important part of all three of these was that worship component.

And when you, when you talk to people who were there, they'll talk about the signs and wonders, or the, you know, maybe some of the amazing preaching or whatever. But they'll also talk about how the worship was so remarkable, and you could get lost in it. And Jeffrey was, you know, trying to encourage us in that direction.

I really think that part of what the Lord is doing, uh, at least if he gets his way and men don't get in the way and screw it up, uh, right now, is he's trying to restore that passion for worship to the church as a whole. And one of the things I'm seeing is that a lot of churches I'm visiting, they don't all do it all the time, but but many of them are doing it episodically and with great intention. You know, "Three months from now, we're going to have a worship weekend, and all we're going to do is we're going to gather from, make it up, 8:00 AM to 10 PM, and we're just going to worship straight through. We'll have sandwiches in the lobby, so if you're hungry, you can go get a little bit to eat. But what we really want is everyone to be faced down before the Lord. Cancel your calendars, don't book other things, break away, get sitters for the kids, or bring them along if they're old enough to be able to take it. Um, but, you know, we're going to have this extended time of worship."

And I think one of the things that has happened in the last 40 years, and like the proverbial frog in the kettle, I don't think anyone needs that to be explained. We've used it enough. I think we all know what it means. Like the proverbial frog in the kettle, one of the problems that the modern American church has. I don't see it so much when I'm in, say, Uganda or Kenya or Rwanda or Zambia or something. I don't see it so much in Korea, uh, and which I, you know, just came from Korea. I don't even see it among the Armenians. Um, but we, in the American church, we are highly distracted. We are caught up in our own slavery. And many of, much of our slavery revolves around this right here.

And the way you'll see it now, just to be clear, I was doing it too, but I was actually looking up the verses I wanted to use for this. I wasn't doing anything else. But you'll see people texting or returning email during a worship service. Um, maybe they're even checking Facebook or Instagram. And I'm like, "Really?"

And part of what has really damaged the American church is the Seeker Sensitive movement. Now, that is a highly controversial statement, but I'll stand my ground and, and I'll take the fight if I need to. Because what we did in the Seeker Sensitive movement is we built big churches, surely, but they were a mile wide and an inch deep, and not always even an inch. Um, and the proof of what I'm saying in that is that during the Seeker Sensitive movement, we lost the moral high ground in America. And at the start of that movement, I don't know exactly where to put the start point, but somewhere in the '80s, America was still predominantly Christian, and people thought through a Christian lens and a Christian worldview. Yeah, that's what we had. And we so diluted worship, but also the preaching of the word, in, I would say, an authentic way, which means true to the intended meaning of the text. We so diluted all of that that by the end of the Seeker Sensitive movement, we had people who thought they were Christians because they went to church. But back to the Billy Sunday comment, they were like someone sitting in a garage and they thought they were a car. And so we diluted the force of the Gospel, we diluted the meaning of the Gospel, and we produced a bunch of people who were ultimately not disciples.

And that's what Moses had. He had people who were complaining. We looked at that last night. And so we had a bunch of people who, well, "I'll take Christianity on my terms. Terms. I, I still want to sleep with my boyfriend or girlfriend. I, it's okay to take drugs. I can go tattoo my body. I can do all these things that hitherto were like, 'What are you talking about? That, that's not Christianity.'" But suddenly everything was okay. And so the reason they had to go three days' journey into the wilderness was not only so they could, you know, break away and ultimately head to the Holy Land, but it was also so they could disengage from the world in which they lived and enter into the realm of God.

So I want to challenge everybody here now. Jeffrey, you're going to, you and Des are able to do what you do as leaders of this congregation. I can't tell you how to run your church, but maybe you want to think about having a worship weekend, um, whenever you can plan that. I mean, there was intentionality in planning behind this, but never mind whether that happens. Each of you, I want to challenge each of you sitting, sitting here within the sound of my voice, and hi out there on the web stream, wherever you may be, you guys too. Um, I want to challenge you. This is the middle part of June. Sometime before the end of July, so that gives you six weeks to figure it out. I want to challenge you to take a day. And I want you to go someplace. And I don't mean Starbucks because it'll be too many distractions there, right? Maybe, I don't know, open the sanctuary. People can come here. Um, it might be hot here in Central Texas, uh, by mid-July, so or the end of July. Maybe, maybe outdoors wouldn't be your best call at this time. But if you can, I don't know, go to Colorado, go up in the mountains. It could, to wherever you can pull it off. I don't care where you do it. But take a day. One day. Turn off your phone. You may not use your phone, not even to look up Bible verses. Bring a real one in instead of a digital one, okay? And go somewhere with God. You go. I don't know how to spend a day with God. Figure it out. Just start reading the passages. I don't know, something will strike you. You can pray into that. Get on your face. Fast. I know it's a shocking idea, but fast. Don't eat any food and seek the Lord for one single day.

Now, they were going to go three days into the wilderness, and it doesn't say exactly how long they were going to work, worship, but, um, but they had to get away. And I think if we would become intentional about this in seeking the face of God and disrupting the normal flow of life on purpose, I'm not available. I don't care if there's a crisis, it's going to wait until I get back. And someone will say, "Well, how long is a day?" Well, technically, I guess it's 24 hours. But if you can only make it from sunrise to sunset, then do that. But what I'm really suggesting is that you give some dedicated time to God. And like I said, turn off your phone. Off. Not just in flight mode, off, or leave it behind because it has become part of the tyranny of the modern age.

And if you'll do that, you'll clear your mind. And part of why I'm so impassioned about this is when I was flying home from Korea, I was reading through a big block of Isaiah, which I haven't really had time to do for a little while. And it's interesting, in my Bible here, this one, the paper one, um, I have notations of either prophetic words the Lord's spoken to me or that people have given to me sprinkled all through Isaiah. And these were all coming back to life with me. And so it wasn't a whole day, but I think I had three hours of just solidly reading Isaiah. And man, it was like I was getting all this stuff, and I was like, "Yeah, okay, I'm ready to, I'm ready to go to L.A.!" Man, I'm. And so people ask, you know, "Well, how do I get my passion back?" Spend time with the one you love, right? I mean, that works in marriage, to go on a date.

So, um, I want to really challenge you to do that. And again, whether you guys have a worship weekend or not, that's, you figure that out. But, but every person in this church, by the end of July, that gives you six weeks to sort this out. Find one single day. Maybe take a day off work, take a weekend day, wherever you're going to do it, however you're going to do it. We're not going to put a bunch of legalism around this. Just do it. Get with God. Figure it out. You will benefit from it, and I think the church will be stronger. Amen. Amen.

All right, with that, let's go to the book of Galatians and also the book of Acts. We're going to be starting our Acts journey in Chapter 13, and in Galatians, we're going to chapter 3. Now, we're going to start with the book of Galatians, and in the book of Galatians, Paul is writing to a bunch of believers whom he has won to the Lord and has discipled. But he says something very interesting. Uh, Galatians 3:1 and following, "O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?"

All right, well, this passage that we've read was written by Paul, we don't know exactly, but maybe in the late '40s or early '50s. Jesus is crucified, we think, in 33 AD. So this is around 15 years after the death of Jesus. And it's an interesting way to address your congregation when you presumably love people. He's calling them foolish. And the reason he's doing it is because they're, well, they're being fools. They're, they're making bad choices. And he actually uses very strong language. He says, "Who has bewitched you? Who has put you under enchantment?" And when he says this, this is not just a turn of phrase, although we might dumb it down to be that because of the way we think in America. He's actually talking about witchcraft. He is actually talking about people who have come under a spell. And he's saying something has gone on that has knocked you off course.

When you initially believed, you believed into a Jesus who was publicly portrayed as crucified, and you believed that he died for you. That's really what's underlying this phrasing when he says "publicly portrayed as crucified." But he says, "Let me ask you one diagnostic question. This will put my finger right on the issue that I see in you at a distance. Did you receive the Spirit?" And he's referring to the Holy Spirit, "because you followed works of the law, or because you listened with faith and believed?"

Now, what's happening in Galatia is they're, they're moving away from grace. And when they're moving away from grace, they are moving toward a legalistic righteousness. They've had a group of people come through, they're usually called Judaizers. They want to take people back into a kind of Judaism. And by the time of this letter, we've had the Jerusalem Council, and the council in Jerusalem has said, "Look, you don't have to become a Jew to be a Christian." But Christianity still isn't fully differentiated from Judaism. It's still kind of viewed as a sect of Judaism. So there's a lot of crossover and kind of backwash, back and forth, between the Jewish sect and those who want to follow the law, and those who are Gentiles and don't need to follow the law. And part of the confusion, of course, is the Jews are highly acculturated to their law, and the Gentiles are not. And so the Jews are trying to make them conform, and the Gentiles are wondering, "Do we need to conform to get, you know, the whole enchilada?"

And so Paul says, "Well, think about it this way. When the Holy Spirit came, were you obeying the law?" And the answer is no, we weren't. And so based on that, that clearly indicates to you that you don't have to do all of these works in order to be in grace with God. And then he uses again the term "foolish." Now, I'm going to suggest that's probably not your best way to win friends and influence people. I mean, I might say it to Jeffrey and Desiree because we're friends and we'd all have a laugh about it. But in general, if you say this to people, they're going to get their back up, right? But Paul's trying to get their attention. So sometimes you say things to kind of shock people.

And so he says, "You began with the Spirit, but now you're trying to perfect things by the flesh." And then he goes on. I'm going to skip verse four. He says, in verse five, "Is he who, or is the one who supplies the Spirit to you? God is he who supplies his Holy Spirit to you, and who is continuing to work miracles among you?" Now, that's not usually the way it's translated, but it's a present tense verb in Greek. And so there's no question what Paul is saying. Miracles are an ongoing thing in the Galatian churches, plural, not just one church, but multiple congregations, which we're going to look at in a moment. Miracles are an ongoing thing among these churches, not because they're following works of the law and drawing out, but because they are hearing with faith. They have that "I trust God. We, we believe this and take it at face value."

Now, one of the big challenges that we face as believers, and especially American believers, especially now, is that it's very difficult for us to trust true. And there are multiple reasons for that. We were talking last night about the multiple scandals that have hit the, the American church. We just recently had the, whatever exactly went on with Tony Evans, Mike Blee. We can go down the list and name all these different people. And after a while, you kind of think, "Are there any people out there who are really legit, who are towing a line?" And with that, one of the things that the enemy will do in that is he will cause our heart to draw back and kind of like, "Mmm, show me what you got." And yet, and by the way, I'm not asking you to do this for me. I'm, I'm just trying to give you some instruction from the word of God. And yet, in the scripture, we are commanded to submit to our leaders and so on. And so on the one hand, we can acknowledge that with our head, but our hearts are not aligned with our leaders. And when that happens, there's a breakdown in trust, of course. But with it, there's a breakdown in leadership.

Now, I am making the simplifying assumption that the leaders we follow are worthy of being followed. And not all leaders are. So part of what we've got to do is figure out who are we going to follow based on the fact that they are credible people that you know are worthy of being, being followed. So, you know, it's kind of a weird thing, but a lot of people know that I have, have had a long-term friendship with Mike Blee. It's been at times closer and at times less close, not because we ever had a falling out, but just, we're both busy people, and so that's kind of been the way it is. Now, since every, all, everything broke out last fall, we haven't really communicated at all. I did send him one email, and he said, "I really don't want to talk." All right. So we didn't. Um, so at this moment, we're very much in a more distant kind of situation. And I don't know how long that'll persist. Um, but within our own community at Orbis, um, you know, I had a town hall, and we had several hundred people that joined us, and we made the recordings available, and several thousand more watched them. But I felt it necessary to say, "I've never had an affair." I don't know if that's unusual in the history of the church for a leader to have to say that, but I felt it was necessary because I could feel kind of people pulling back and that sort of tension. And I also went on and I said, "By the way, I've never even touched a woman other than my wife since I've been married." So, you know, my hands are clean in this. And you could almost hear the "Thank God." Um, but it, but it shows you the, the level of rancor we're dealing with in the body of Christ.

But it's not just fallen leaders. I mean, that for sure is a thing. But, you know, we've had so many scandals, and I would say leaders who are dubious in one way or another. And I'm going to speak just momentarily into politics, but I am going to say I'm not taking one side of the aisle or the other because, uh, you may remember a president named William Jefferson Clinton, and how he got impeached over lying under oath about a particular woman named Monica Lewinsky. And of course, we could cluck our tongues at that. But let's not forget that there's a Republican named Donald Trump who has just been convicted of 43 counts of lying under oath in connection with a woman. Well, who's worse? I don't know. But it's hard for us to follow our political leaders, right? I mean, in this country, meaning this region of the country, in L.A. Texas, among this people, you probably say it's easier to believe Donald Trump. I get that. I understand why you might say that. But I'm just saying we can tar both sides of the aisle with this issue. And so it's hard for us to trust our leaders. And then we hear about graft and corruption, and, you know, whatever it is. We look at money being, you know, misappropriated, and it's difficult.

And so back to Paul's passage, he's admonishing them, and he's trying to reel them back in. But he says, "He supplies his Spirit to you, and he works miracles among you." And it happens because you listen with faith. Now, we talked about this level four, or fourth dimension of faith last night. This gift of faith that catalyzes miracles, that's an active faith, that's kind of a triggering faith. But there's also this receptive faith, um, which I was also speaking about. And I said that that kind of expectation, that that that is combustible. And I mean, we had some good things going on here last night when we stayed and prayed. I mean, you know, some of these were pretty hard cases. But what's your name? Joe, with the oxygen? Is that his name? Joe George. So you don't have your tubes in this morning? Yeah. And he was met for those of you who left. He was measuring his oxygen level with his meter, and he'd taken his oxygen out around an hour earlier, and it was reading in the '90s. And it wasn't routinely doing that when he walked in. I don't want to overstate it, and I don't want to get my facts wrong, but he's here. He can tell us a story. You held up your meter. I take it that means you just checked it. And I just checked it. It's 92. 92. So there we go. Now, by the way, no one even touched him. He watched somebody getting prayer, and just because of that, that expectation level, the Lord touched him. And so today, he doesn't even have his oxygen bottle. And did you sleep with it last night, or did you not need it? I did to bed. Okay. You put it in when you went to bed, probably as a safety precaution, right? Yeah. But anyway, miracles are a sign of grace. And that's what I want to talk about this morning by looking at Paul's activities in Galatia. Because much of the Bible is meant to be read synoptically, meaning side by side. And you won't really understand, in this case, the letter to the Galatians unless you understand the journey through Galatia. And I want to do that this morning. And I'm going to tell you up front, I, I want to be a wrecking ball this morning. And I'm not saying I'm Donald Trump, but I want to be a wrecking ball. And I want to put, I want to take the wrecking ball out and I want to break down this hackneyed, tired trope that grace is unmerited favor.

Now, on the one hand, it is. So it, it's not entirely untrue. But the problem is, for many of us, because of being raised in conventional church environments, whatever flavor they are, Baptist, Methodist, whatever, um, we have been told "Grace is unmerited favor" so many times that we almost fall asleep when we hear people talk about it. And with it, we have this image of God as some sort of grandfather. And, you know, we know grandfathers love their, well, they're supposed to, unless they're of the modern type, but they're supposed to love their grandkids and delight in them and, you know, all the things that people say. Well, you know, you get, you get all the fun, but you don't have to change diapers and discipline. And so, you know, all the good with none of the bad. Grandchildren are the reward for having not killed your own children when you raised them, right? All of that stuff. So we have this image of God, and he's this grandfatherly old man up on a throne, and he looks at us and he says, "Oh yes, Desiree, she's such a cute little girl. Oh, Jeffrey, he's such a cute little boy. Oh, Joanie, she's such a delightful little gal." You know, we kind of have this ingrained in us. It's somewhere in the background. It's almost like a virus in the operating system, and it's drawing off power. And I'm using that language deliberately. Grace, okay, it is unmerited. We don't deserve it. And it is favor. Fair enough. Now that we've said it, let's just push it off the stage. We're not going to talk about it that way anymore. This morning, we're going to talk about grace is it is a manifestation, or it is the active power of God poured out. It is an empowerment. It is something that comes upon us. And so miracles are a visible manifestation of grace poured out. And that's different from God being a grandfather. That's why Joe, did I, George, George, that's why George has 92 on his oxygen meter this morning. And last night, it went as high as 98. We sat and watched it do it. I don't know why it's dropped back a little bit, but, but anyway, I mean, there, there's a miracle there. There's a, there an empowerment from the Spirit of God upon him such that he's sitting there without his oxygen bottle. And you know, last night he was sitting there without his oxygen bottle. And that, that empowerment, that divine energy, if you want to say that, although it sounds kind of new-agey, the Greek word is *energeia*, so it's not out of place. It's just we got to be sure we have our language square and true. That *energeia*, you would get all this, you're working on a doctorate at Duke Divinity School, that that *energeia* has overcome George's body. And right now, he's, he's living in that. And Paul says he's continuing to do it to his church in churches in Galatia. And, you know, we had other people who were touched last night. And so it's that idea that I want to take us toward. My first warning bell has already gone off. I wax eloquent. I don't know if that's good or not, but anyway, here we go.

So in Acts chapter 13, we have Paul's journey, and they've been sent out by the church, uh, in Antioch. But it's interesting, it says that they commended them to the grace of God. So what does that mean? When the church sent them out, they basically, they didn't just say, "Yes, may God look upon you and smile and, you know, good luck." That'd be the way we understand it because of our stripped-down, watered-down, secularized American Christianity. But what they're really saying is, "May the, may the empowering presence of God be upon you as you go, in order that everywhere you go, you take dominion over the works of the enemy." That would be a much more robust way of saying it. And so they're commended by the grace of God. And they journey through what is modern Turkey. And scholars call this their first missionary journey. And they visit seven cities. We don't tend to pay a lot of attention to these details, uh, when we read the Bible, mainly because unless you've gone on some sort of a trip to explore these areas, they, they're a long way away. It was a long time ago. We don't have any context. It's just out of our, as we say, out of our ken. No pun intended. But they go to a place called Pisidian Antioch, not to be confused with the Antioch from which they had been commissioned, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Pamphylia, Perga, and Antalya. And, uh, like I said, most of us have no idea where these places are, but they're in the center of Turkey. And all of these seven cities, Paul established congregations with Barnabas, and they became the core of the churches of Galatia to which the letter to the Galatians was written. And so the events that happened in these towns form the backdrop of understanding that book of Galatians, which was written after the fact.

So let's look at these, uh, places town by town. In Acts chapter 13, it says, "Now Paul and his companions set forth from Paphos and came to Perga and Pamphylia. And it's here that John leaves them and returns to Jerusalem." That will come back to haunt him, but anyway, I don't want to get drawn into a, into a side eddy with all that. But anyway, um, he, they begin preaching in Pisidian Antioch, and they, they, they basically recapitulate the story of salvation. They talk about Abraham's calling and so forth. Um, and then David. But verse 39, "By him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses."

Now, this is the backdrop to everything that's going to go on in the book of Galatians, because people are trying to go back to the law of Moses. And so Paul's preaching to Gentiles. There's no reason that they would particularly have any interest in the law of Moses, other than there are synagogues around, and they kind of have some vague notion of, of what Judaism is. But, you know, in, in modern America today, people may drive by churches all the time, and they have some sense that it has something to do with God and religion. But because of the, the, the departure from faith in our society, many times people have no idea what goes on in a church. I mean, they don't know if it's a Satanic ritual. They don't know if they're drinking blood. I mean, we talk about drinking, eating the body and drinking the blood. Are those people cannibals? The early Romans thought that Christians were cannibals. They just don't know what goes on at all. But neither do they take the time to find out.

So in the background, in the minds of these people, they may have been thinking about, "Yeah, we've heard something about the law of Moses, and these Jews, they kind of act like they got something that we don't have." Well, that people could relate to us that way, right? We act like we've got something they don't have, and we do. But we got to be careful that we don't take on an air of superiority. That's the risk. And we do actually have something better than what they have. That is also a true statement. But again, we, we've got to be careful not to put off airs that we think we're better than they are.

So, "By him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses." So Paul's already saying, as part of his core message, the law of Moses can't get you all the way home. It's, it's incomplete. "Beware, therefore, lest what is said in the prophets should come about: 'Look, you scoffers! Be astounded and perish; for I am doing a work in your days, a work that you would not believe even if one told you.'"

Now, the word there, "work," when he says "a work that you would not believe," this is the word *erga* or *ergon* in the singular, and it means literally a miraculous work. It's not just any old work. It's not just like, "Yeah, something happened randomly." But rather, "Lest I do something miraculous in your midst which you disbelieve and therefore do not get the benefit of it, even if somebody comes bearing witness about it." Now, that could, that could be the whole message right there. Because we live in a time where people tend to disbelieve. I was just talking about the credibility gap. And when we go out as believers, you may not realize this in L.A. Texas, but I'm from Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, 3% of our people go to church on Sunday. 3%. There's probably another 20% or maybe 30 who believe on some level, but they don't go to church any longer. They're disaffected. And so when someone comes bearing witness, telling of miraculous works from God, the risk is that people disregard it or dismiss it out of hand. And so part of what we're trying to do is to reintroduce the idea of a miraculous gospel. But we're also needing to think about, in our own case, how do we maintain credibility as we bear witness to this? What, by what mechanism do we communicate that? And there's probably not a one-size-fits-all answer, but we need to be aware of the world in which we're functioning.

All right, so verse 42, "As they went out, the people begged that these things might be told them the next Sabbath." In other words, "Come back, tell us more. Say, stay on." And after the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who, as they spoke to them, watch this, "urged them to continue in the grace of God."

Now, what does that mean? I'll tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean, "Think God loves me and he thinks I'm cool, so, you know, make this all about you and your identity with your papa." That's not what they're saying. What they are saying is, "Stay centered on the empowering grace of God, the active presence, if you like that language better, such that you will see miracles this week. And when we get together next week, we'll talk about what happened and how to go higher." That's what they're telling them to do. Stay in the active power, the dynamic activity of God. That's what we want to do. And who are they saying it to? Jews and devout converts to Judaism. So those who were born Jews, those who have converted into Judaism, the very people who might want to fall into legalism, works, going through the motions, a dead, formalistic religion, which would be much of what's left of American Christianity. Don't do that.

So this is being spoken to Jews and Gentiles. And then it goes on in verse 48. I'm kind of dropping down here. It says, "When the Gentiles heard this, the Lord had commanded Paul and Barnabas to be a light to the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth. When the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord. And as many as were appointed to the, uh, to eternal life, they believed."

But just before that, in verse 46, Paul and Barnabas, it says, "They spoke out boldly." And it would take boldness to say this. "They said to the Jews who did not believe, after having a chance to assess this, uh, 'You judge yourselves to be unworthy of eternal life.'" Now, that is a strong statement. It's a little softer than saying, "You're going to hell," but that's what it's saying. And I want to submit to you that if we're going to be a people of miracles, that there's going to be some part of the, I like the language of the advancing church and the declining church. There's going to be some part of the declining church, they might even be friends and relatives of yours, who will judge themselves to be unworthy of eternal life. And a big part of that will be because of the offense they take at the active, dynamic power of God moving through, through the advancing church.

Now, it might be motivated by jealousy. It could be motivated by unbelief. It could be motivated by distrust of leaders and speakers. There could be a lot of reasons that they do that. But that is the inescapable meaning of this passage. It's not something we like to talk about very much. But again, part of where we are in the cycle of time is this is a season of combat and war. Yeah, it's literally going on in the Middle East, but there's a spiritual war going on. And right now, we're engaged in battle for the heart and soul of our nation, for the heart and soul of our denominations, for the heart and soul of, of all of it. And we have to recognize that this will actually happen. Jesus warned his own followers when he sent them out in the Gospels, "People will reject you. They'll treat you shabby, poorly." And yet, in the midst of all that, it goes on. And it says, "And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region." Why was it spreading? Because there was reality. Everybody's looking for reality. That's ultimately what people are after.

And, you know, this is Texas Tech country, but my friend John Rutledge, he traveled with Lonnie a lot more than I did. He was on the road with him for 10 years. I was on the road with him for one. I, I got a lot out of Lonnie. But, but I mean, John knew Lonnie inside and out. And when Lonnie was dying, he was staying in John Rutledge's home. So anyway, last year, I was in, uh, Oklahoma City in February, and I'm getting ready to preach, and my phone rings. And I'm thinking, "Man, you almost, no one actually makes a phone call on a cell phone these days unless they're a plumber or an electrician or something like that." Uh, but anyway, my phone rings, and I'm, I'm like, five minutes till I'm supposed to get up and speak. But I'm thinking, "Man, if John's calling me, there's got to be a reason." So I step out of the sanctuary and answer the phone. He says, "Ken, you're not going to believe this. He says, 'I'm at Texas A&M.'" And he said, "The Lord's moving here." And I said, "Well, what's happening?" He said, "'Well, I've just been preaching in the central quad of the university, and I gave an altar call, and we are baptizing people in the fountain in the central quad of Texas A&M.'" Now, can we both, can we all agree here that Texas A&M is not a Bible college? True. So I checked in with him a little later and I said, "So, how many got baptized?" "4,500 students." 4,500 students at Texas A&M, Party Central. And then the next night, they had a meeting at some, I don't know, barn or shed or something down the road, and so many people showed up, they couldn't fit them all into the shed, but they were confessing their sexual sin, as you would expect, their drunkenness, as you would expect, their drug taking, as you would expect, their cheating on exams, as you might have expected, and on it goes. And that's not to say that Tech's any better than A&M, by the way, but just kind of giving you the gauges of the things that were being confessed.

But when I, when I tell you that story, verse 49, "And the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region." John's been back to Texas A&M since then, and they had more than 10,000 people show up to hear him preach. Have you heard about this on the news? No way. Uh-uh. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. This is what we, you know, hear about when we talk about censorship. The mainstream media doesn't want to cover this. Social media channels are shutting it down. Doesn't fit the meme. But things are busting out in Texas. And I, I just want to ask the question, if it can happen there, why can't it happen here? Why shouldn't it be going on in love? And so the word of the Lord was spreading and growing.

But the thing I want to tell you, back to a comment I made a moment ago, is this is about reality. And people are looking for solutions to why their life isn't working, or to use a little more earthy language, their life sucks. And they want someone to tell them how to unsuck it. I learned that language in the military, actually. I learned that language from my daughter in the military. But anyway, um, fortunately, it doesn't go down below that. But, but, but this is a really key point because when the active, dynamic grace of God is visible, when miracles are happening, when healings are happening, when prophecies are happening, when we're looking into people's lives and we have discernment about what's ailing them, when people are finding freedom from whether it's their drugs or their sexual addiction or their porn or they're drinking or whatever it is, when they are finding that, they will say, "I want that because I don't like living this way." But, but what, what are they being told in the universities? What are they being told by the mainstream media? What is the government telling them? This is just the way it is. Accept it. And so what are we doing? We're leaving people in their own form of slavery. Yeah.

"Let my people go. Let them go. Let them go. Give them freedom. Let them go three days into the wilderness that they may worship me, that the Spirit of God may come down and break their bondage, heal their ills. Let my people go." And we are called to bring that message.

Now, I know how it works. When you're young and passionate, you might actually do some of that. You might stand on a street corner. You might go at your college campus or high school campus, go and start a Bible study or knock on doors and share the gospel. By the time you're 35 or 40, it's like, "Yeah, I got a job, a career, I got kids. We got to, you know, get these kids to bed, feed them dinner, all that stuff." And life becomes rather predictable. And what I want to suggest to you is, is that while on the one hand, I don't want you anyone to become a bad parent or grandparent, at the same time, we actually need to think about our lives a bit because we may need to reconfigure how we live.

And I'm going to go further here. I'm going to do what Paul did to the Galatians. We have become foolish. And in that, we do not realize that we have become worldly as the church. How have we become worldly? Well, we look like the world. We watch the same sporting teams that they watch. We drive the same cars they drive. We eat at the same restaurants. We shop at the same stores. And we do what they do. Their lifestyle and our lifestyle looks the same.

Now, in a place like L.A., it's easy to confuse the two because there's a lot of religion which has the form of godliness but denies the power thereof. And so, you know, you could look at, I'm not trying to call anyone out, so I'll just say XYZ Joe Christian or Jane Christian, and your life might look quite a bit like theirs. And so the question is, where and when are we actually delivering the active, dynamic power of God to people? It has to happen someplace. And they might not walk through the doors of Springs Fellowship Church, so we might have to go to them, wherever and however we do that. I don't know where that is. It might be at the golf course. You know, I've held meetings at a really high-end country club. One of the guys that comes to my meetings in Houston, um, he's a very wealthy man, belongs to the best golf course in Houston. And, uh, we held a meeting at the, at the country club a couple years back, and a couple hundred men showed up, and the spirit of God just wrecked the place. And afterward, people were, these men were coming up to me, and, you know, a lot of them were very wealthy.

Men themselves, they wouldn't be members of that Country Club if they weren't wealthy and therefore they're successful. And most of them were either attorneys or businessmen of some kind, nearly all of them. And, uh, and they're like, "What is this? We've never seen this before." And by the way, "Can I talk to you about my marriage?" And by the way, "Can I talk to you about my son or daughter?" And, D, D, D, D, 'cause their life sucked and they want someone to help them un-suck it.

Why are you willing to be that person? Are you willing to break out of your comfort zone? Are you willing to bring the grace of God? And I don't mean God loves you and you're so awesome, I don't mean that. I'm talking about God's power coming in and making a change, blowing them out of whatever this is that they're stuck in. "Let my people go," because they are God's people. And God not only wants his church back, which is what Lonnie and John used to say, he wants his country back. He wants to do something, but he's generally not going to do it without us. That's right. He could, but he usually won't because he wants co-laborers. And so we are entrusted with this grace. And with that, the word of the Lord is spreading throughout the region.

So what did the Jews do? Verse 50. They incited the devout women of high standing. Okay, these are the churchgoing, you know, blue-haired ladies, I guess. They're wealthy, they're moneyed. They'd be the wives of all these guys at the Country Club. And the leading men of the city. And they stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas and drove them out of the district. Are we willing to stand up in the face of that? We're not used to that because we don't think of America that way. America is the place where, like, everybody's a Christian and the church can thrive. Not so much anymore.

And let me just throw this into the middle of the room. I'm not trying to be political, but I will say this: Presidents always make their biggest and most aggressive moves in a second term. I don't know who's going to win this election in the fall. I have no word from the Lord on that, but I'll tell you, but no matter which guy gets put in, assuming that both of them are eligible and alive and run, I hope I said that well. Uh, they're both going to be second-term presidents, whichever candidate gets elected. And so look for big, aggressive moves. You may say, "Well, then I want Trump, man. He's going to clean out all that swamp that wanted before." Yeah, that might be right. But just remember, Joe Biden gets in, Christianity is going to come under fire, for sure, for sure it will because he's shown his colors. He may go to Catholic church, but he's anyway.

Okay, so they drove them out of the district. And they shook off the dust from their feet. Jesus had said when he sent out his disciples, "If they don't receive you, shake the dust off your feet." Are we willing to take a stand like that? And so they go on to Iconium. And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit, even in the midst of that kind of opposition. I want to suggest to you that you can actually have a Holy Ghost Revival that will shake a region, not just a city, a region, not just a city, a region. You need to be thinking bigger than LEC, Texas. It's a good starting point, but you need to be thinking bigger than LEC, Texas. I'm thinking maybe as far west as the New Mexico state line. I'm thinking maybe even into New Mexico. I'm thinking north into Amarillo, right? I'm thinking, you know, south down towards, I don't get far enough south, down near the Rio Grande. But whatever. Hang on, I got something in my eye here.

Um, but we need to have the idea of a regional move of God in mind because that's what it says. The, the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region. And these disciples who have now basically been run out of the club because they have the upper crust, the wealthy, the money, the, the influential, the connected, they're opposing them. And yet the Holy Spirit is filling them. Now, the Holy Spirit does a lot of things when he fills people. But can I just suggest to you, they're doing more than speaking in tongues, as good as that is? Can I suggest to you that they're doing more than just rejoicing, as good as that is to rejoice in affliction because we're commanded to do that in Philippians? All right.

So on they go to Iconium. Now we're in verses one, uh, chapter 14, 1:7. And so at Iconium, they entered together into the Jewish synagogue and spoke, spoke in such a way that a great number of both Jews and Greeks believed. Okay, well, if they're speaking in such a way, there's obviously some sort of grace on their words, on their language, on their sharing. And yes, Paul and Barnabas are commissioned to be apostles, they're commissioned to be preachers of this kind. But they're, they're building a cadre of people who are themselves preaching the gospel house to house. And we see elsewhere in Acts where it describes that type of behavior.

Okay, but the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. What do we see again? A divide opening up within this city of Iconium. So they remain for a long time in the midst of opposition. What do you do? Dig in. They remain for a long time speaking boldly for the Lord, who bore witness to the word of his grace. Here's that same exact language again. And when it says the Lord bore witness, it's not like he's up there going, "I love you guys, you're so awesome, you're brave in the midst of difficulty." No, miracles are breaking out. Why? The Lord's bearing witness tangibly, practically. There's expectation, and they're triggering miracles because of that fourth dimension of faith that we talked about last night. So whether they're triggering it themselves, or the environment is conducive because the people are receiving with belief, the Lord bears witness to the word of his active, dynamic power. Again, I'm moving away from the grandfather on the throne, and he granted signs and wonders to be done by their hands. If you needed any proof that I am not misapplying or mix-mis-exegeting the text. But the people of the city were divided. Some sided with the Jews, and some with the apostles. So this is what you're headed into. Everyone says, "We want revival." All right, well, now that you know, set your course and you know, rig the sails for heavy seas.

And when an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews with their rulers to mistreat them and stone them, they learned of it and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding country. And there they continued to preach the gospel. What does the word gospel mean? Gospel is a word that comes to us from Rome. I think I've preached on this in this church before, but it, it literally is what an emperor announced when he would come to power, that there was a new king and that his reign and rule was now in effect, and that it was his intention to bring good to them. They were going to partake in the spoils of a battle they did not fight. So what are they doing? They're announcing the invasion of the kingdom. They're announcing that Jesus is on the throne. Jesus is that king. And as they announce the kingdom of God, what happens? Miracles break out in confirmation of the message. Preach the right message, you will get the right results. Preach the wrong message, preach a woke gospel, preach a watered-down liberal gospel, preach a gospel that is bereft of any expectation of power, and you'll get exactly that.

And this is why we have to shift our own thinking. We can't affect everybody else. We can only take care of ourselves, really. Um, and preach to them with the idea of bringing them to our side. But at the end of the day, we, the only person we can ultimately control is ourselves. So it's up to us to make sure our mindset and our activities are consistent with that, that which we have been commanded to do. And so the whole idea of, "Well, you know, I'm going to go be a missionary in Indonesia." Well, that's great. But what are you doing in LEC? Or, you know, did you take a drive to Amarillo? Or Joanie, where do you guys live? You live in Amarillo, don't you? Yeah. All right. So what are some other towns around here? I don't know all the towns around here. Just throw one out. Abilene. There we go. I know that one. Okay. So what, what's happening in Abilene? How do we, how do we extend our reach from here to Abilene? What does that look like? How do we get those inroads? How do we, how do we trigger and catalyze something to happen in, in Abilene? Think about it tangibly, because that's how regional moves of God get underway. Does that make sense? And I'm not just talking about sending money. I'm talking about maybe sending people, missionaries. Maybe we have connections to other churches. They invite us to, "Well, why don't you come on over here and share the overflow of what's happening there in LEC?" So we do. And you pick some other towns as well. You get the idea. All right.

So that, that's what happened in Iconium. All right. Now we're in Lystra. And so, uh, verses 8 to 19 cover this third city. And the first thing that happens in, is now at Lystra, verse 8. There was a man sitting who could not use his feet. He was crippled from birth and he had never walked. He listened to Paul speaking. And Paul looking intently at him. Well, come back to that. That's an important phrase right there. Anyway, Paul looking intently at him, seeing that he had the faith to be made well. What's he got? Expectation. Something was engendered within him. This is what happened with George. Something was engendered within him last night as we prayed for you. But I've forgotten your name. Lauren. Lauren. So as we prayed for Lauren, and he knew Lauren, something was engendered. I, I didn't even pray for George. He just took off his oxygen. His oxygen level jumped. I did walk over to pray for him at the end, put my hand on him. But essentially, the work was already done. And so that all happened because of what was going on with Lauren. But this man had the faith to be well. He had expectation. And so Paul says, in a loud voice, "Stand up right on your feet." He sprang up and began walking.

And when the crowd saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices saying in Lydian, "The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men." That's not likely to happen in the United States. I think the risk of it is very low. But notwithstanding, there was a receptivity to what they were saying and doing, which maybe they wouldn't have expected. And so the story goes on that, uh, that they want to offer sacrifice. And Paul and Barnabas won't let them do it. Uh, we're going to skip that part. Verse 17. He's giving them a short sermon. He says, "Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness." Now, this is what we sometimes call common grace. But what's interesting is, in Greek, this is saying he graced you with rain from heaven in fruitful seasons. Because we live in a secularized society, we think rain comes because of the hydrological cycle. And of course, we know that there's too much sunshine now and too much carbon dioxide heating up the earth and so forth. And so we have all of that in the background. But what Paul is saying is, it's the active engagement of God with you by which you have sunshine and rain, and you have the ability to raise crops. And so Paul is saying, there isn't just these momentary points of extraordinary, uh, engagement with God's power. There's an ongoing sense of God's power. And that should be part of our preaching. I know it's a harder sell in our society. But that doesn't make it untrue. Part of why it's a harder sell is people's hearts are hardened because they've not been told the truth for a long time about these matters. And so I don't know that this is the center of all that we preach, but it should be part of what we preach. And so Paul's describing the grace of God because again, the Greek verb there is, "God graced you." God poured out his goodness on you.

All right, so they move on from Lystra. And now they go to Derbe. This is, uh, Acts 14:20 and 21. Paul, by the way, ends up getting stoned. And I don't mean, okay, but he gets stoned by these Jews who have come from Antioch and Iconium. And so what happens? He gets stoned and left for dead. But the disciples gathered around him, presumably they pray for him. He rose up and he entered the city. Now, the Bible is a bit unclear here, but I think it's safe to assume Paul was actually dead, because everyone knows what a dead body looks like. And by the way, if you go on YouTube, you can find footage of people being stoned in Iran and Afghanistan. And let me just say, there's not much doubt when they're dead. We'll just leave it at that. It's pretty gruesome stuff. So you may not want to watch it. Trigger warning and all that stuff. Red flag warning. But, but you can watch this on YouTube. And so they knew when people were dead, when the stoning had been effective. So the disciples gather around him, and he's raised from the dead. I believe he enters the city. And, um, on the next day, he and Barnabas go on to Derbe. I, I often wonder, in what condition was he walking? Was he bruised? Was he sore? Or did the Lord heal even the kind of trauma to the body that stoning would have created? Yeah. Well, again, the Bible just doesn't really give much commentary on that. But anyway, I guess you're in better shape if you're Barnabas, because you didn't get stoned.

So when they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and Iconium and Antioch. Now, that's bravery. But they strengthened the souls of the disciples and encouraged them to continue in the faith, saying that it's through many tribulations, like what we've just been through, that we must enter into the kingdom of God. Now, this is one of my favorite verses, although it's not an easy verse. It's through many tribulations that we enter into the kingdom of God. Jesus said, "From the days of John the Baptist, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God suffers violence, and violent men and women lay hold of it." Now, I don't think that means that we're called to be violent people, but it does mean there is a kind of violence by which we lay hold of the kingdom, we seize that dimension of God's power, and we pray it from heaven to earth, on earth as in heaven. And so we have to contend with the idea of birthing a move of God and releasing the kingdom. I hear Ringo Starr singing, "It Don't Come Easy." You know, "It Don't Come Easy." That's a reality. So if you want to see a move of God, you want to see miracles, you want to live in a kingdom-centric church environment, you are going to contend for it. You'll contend on your knees, you'll contend against crowds and opposition, but you will also see the glory and the victory of breakthrough. They go together.

And so when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting, they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. Well, stop short of saying the grace of God, but it's very clearly implied. Why else would they be fasting, praying, laying hands on them? But to, as Paul said to the Romans, "impart to them some spiritual gift," to infuse into them some kind of a grace that would be an empowering, dynamic, miracle-working Holy Spirit impartation.

All right. So when they had passed through Pisidia and come to Pamphylia, they spoke the word of God in Perga and then they went down to Attalia and from there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been commended to the grace of God. Meaning they themselves had received an impartation, they themselves had been given that dynamic, active power of God unto the release of the very thing that we've just been reading about. And so they arrive, they gather the church, and they declare all that God had done with them and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they remained no little time with the disciples.

All right. So they're home for a bit. Sometime later, as I said, Paul wrote to these congregations scattered throughout this region called Galatia. It's probably between the year 48 and 55, as I said. And so he writes to them. And he'd already written some theology about what had happened in Thessalonica. And we don't know exactly when that happened, maybe more or less the year 51. There's a little bit of wiggle in this, but somewhere around there. Paul had said to the Thessalonians, "Now, Thessalonica is a very different region. Um, this region, Galatia, is over here in Turkey. Thessalonica is over here, kind of in the shoulders of Greece, right at the top end of the, of the Greek Peninsula, below the Balkan region. But when he written to the Thessalonians, he said, 'For we know, brothers, loved by God, that he has chosen you.'" Now, that's an interesting statement because if you come out of any kind of a Calvinist background, Reformed Church, Presbyterian, congregational, anything like that, you've probably been told somewhere along the line, "The elect cannot know that they are the elect. So the best you can do is live as though you are and hope for the best." And I can remember studying this in seminary and thinking, "Wow, that's, that's not much hope." It's also not biblical. Because here's what Paul said: "We know, brothers, loved by God." Okay, so we, first of all, Paul's certain that God loves them. "We know that he chose you." How did he know that? "Because our gospel came not only in word, but also in power, in dunamis, which is the word for miracles." Now, again, there's healing miracles, but there's other kinds of miracles. We know that you are chosen because miracles were breaking out. "And in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction." So when we talk about this, I'm going to insert here in the signs and wonders of the Holy Spirit, not just the power, but in the fullness of the Holy Spirit and with that full conviction. What is full conviction? Well, it means you are fully persuaded, you have trust. And it also means therefore that grace has been poured out and your hearts have been opened, as it said, "As many as the Lord had appointed unto eternal life, their hearts were open." So embedded in the very language that Paul is using to the Thessalonian church is this very concept of the dynamic, active power of grace.

And then he goes on and he says of the Thessalonians, 1 Thessalonians 1:9, "You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, no more fakery, no more dead gods which are not gods, to wait for his Son from Heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come." If this isn't saved, there is no saved. But you can see how miracles are right in the center of all of it. And so the first thing we can conclude about the interplay of miracles and grace is that they signify the coming of the kingdom of God. They confirm the gospel message in the process of being preached. And miracles substantiate that the hearers who receive the word are in fact the recipients of that divine empowerment. They don't need to sit here and kind of cross their fingers. What do they say? "Hope to die, stick a needle in my eye." Yeah, they don't need to do all that stuff because they are locked in. And I've seen this in my own lifetime, various locations and times, um, when people get saved in a miraculous environment where the spirit of God is moving in this way, they can turn away from the Lord. But when they do, they never turn away because they're not sure if they really believe. They turn away because they choose a lifestyle or they want to continue in sin or they get, you know, deceived by some teaching or something. I remember one friend of mine who was saved, and she decided to become a Hindu. And the reason she became a Hindu was because she'd gotten into yoga. And, when her mother died of of liver cancer, cursing God, this friend of mine had prayed for her mother for five years to be born again. Again, her mother literally died with curses on her lips towards the Lord. She could not reconcile the reality that her mother might be in hell. So rather than accept that, she turned away completely and became a Hindu. And that's where she is today. So that's what I mean. People might choose to walk away, but they can't. They can't stay in this wishy-washy middle ground.

And friends, I think this is part of what's happened with American Christianity, especially because of this mega-church, seeker-sensitive movement. People have had no encounter with God. They've had no sense of the power. They've had no, whether it's healing or deliverance or whatever, they've had none of that. And so it's all just kind of make-believe, and your idea against my idea, and by the way, what's for lunch? So that's why we need miracles to be in the center of our gospel. And to be clear, and also to prevent aberrant theology. We want to be careful to state that the absence of signs and wonders at conversion doesn't mean that the grace of God failed to come to the hearers. But what it, what it does mean is we need to incorporate those believers into a community. Like Paul describes in Galatians 3:5, "He is continuing to work miracles." So if you didn't get it on the front end, you can get it after you come through the door. But when Los or Draw, it's around. This is the normal Christian life. This is what church life should look like. And if it's not looking like that, something's going wrong with church as a whole. And this is part of why I, you know, have the diagnostic on the American church that I have. The New Testament pattern is that miracles should accompany the preaching of the gospel and become hallmarks, indications, stamps of the dynamic, active power of God, which we have described as grace poured out upon those who believe. And miracles prove, therefore, that grace is itself powerful and dynamic. It's not mere sentiment. It's not God being a grandpa. And so often we throw words like grace around and we think of it, you know, as the kind smile. One of our other problems is because we are not careful with our language when we're preaching and our theologizing, many times we throw terms around in church which are ill-defined. And consequently, we think we understand what these words mean because they are used repetitively, but we've not actually taken the trouble to lay out what they mean, which is what I've sought to do this morning. I've, I've tried to define very distinctly what does grace mean and move us off of this idea of "God is Grandpa."

And so in writing to the Galatians, Paul makes this statement, which we cited at the front end of this morning: "Does he who supplies a spirit to you and who works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith?" Well, let's take this back to Moses and going into the wilderness to worship. Does he who splits the Red Sea and who brings 10 plagues down upon Egypt do so because you did all the right things, or because you believed God and followed in obedience? Well, that's a fairly clear answer, isn't it? Just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. And so in this very verse, written to the same congregations, the ones that we've just looked at in Acts 13 and 14, Paul states that miracles are not just an initial sign of the grace of God. They are a sign of the continuing grace of God. Now, what does that mean for us practically? It means that, I mean, I'm not saying every day is a miracle day, although often they are. Um, but if we, if we start hitting air pockets, we need to ask ourselves, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?" So in my life, if I go a week and I don't bump into a demon, I go back and I ask the Lord, "Am I in sin? Am I missing something?" If I go a week and I don't see somebody get healed of something. Now, sometimes, like maybe I'm working on my dissertation, I'm not going to see too many people healed when I'm doing this because I'm, I'm isolated, I'm not around people, I'm doing something else. So I'm aware of that dynamic. But, but I'm talking about when I'm in active ministry. We, we have nights that are more anointed, we have nights that are less anointed. That's part of the reality, ebb and flow. But if, if it's not happening at all, and a week turns into a month, turns into six months, turns into a year, we should be going, "Hey, someone give me a mirror. I need to look at the man in the mirror and ask him to make a change." Because if you want to make the world a better place, you got to look at yourself and make a change. Never thought you'd hear Michael Jackson in a sermon, right?

So miracles are durable as well as initiatory. Miracles are durable as well as initiatory. And the realm of miracles is not something accessed through deeds, confessions, striving, great exertions, certainly not even through works of the Jewish law. Miracles come by continuing on in that same power, that same grace that was accessed because of faith at the very beginning of our Christian walk. We might even say more strongly that when miracles cease, that's a barometer of whether we are living in grace. Which is strong language, I know. For some of you, you're like, "Whoa, that bullet cut hair." Yeah, might have. Paul says this in Galatians 5, and I'm, I'm going to read it because you need to see it in the pages of scripture. "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery." All right. Well, if Jesus set us free from sin in order that we would walk in freedom from sin, and we're called to stand in that, but he, Paul's contemplating, you could actually go back to slavery. You could be like the Jews wanting to return to Egypt. Paul says, "Look, I'm telling you that if you accept circumci-," uh, "circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. And I am testifying again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ. You have fallen away from grace." This is the Apostle of Grace saying this to people. So when miracles cease, we've actually rendered the grace of God of no effect, and we may have actually severed ourselves from grace. The good thing is, Jesus reattached Malchus's ear. So I think if even if you sever, you could get reconnected. But, but there is a very clear warning here, which if you've come out of a church, and again, they're, they're kind of scattered all through this part of the country, so surely some of you will have heard, "Once saved, always saved." Beware, beware. You have a barometer. Are you living in a world of breakthrough and freedom? Now, it doesn't just happen in the church sanctuary. It should be happening in your own homes. It should be happening in your own lives. You may not get a, a breakthrough every week, but, but there should be an ongoing testimony of the Lord coming to your rescue and doing, I don't know, amazing things.

You know, my daughter, the one who in, uh, in the Army, she had an accident, very severe accident, car accident in March. And I would say the conditions under which the accident occurred were dubious. The way Texas law is written, she was deemed at fault. But the other driver admitted that he was the one who caused it. But that didn't matter because the law is the law. All right. Well, she calls her insurance company only to find out that despite what she thought she had done, she didn't have insurance. Ooh, that's bad. Because now we have this damage to two cars, he's making medical claims, and I'm looking at this and I'm like, "This is going to be a minimum of $30 or $40,000, and she's got nothing." You know, the Lord made all that go away. Doesn't matter how it happened, he did that. That was a miracle. It wasn't a healing miracle. It was a money miracle. And she wasn't injured. Her car is back in action. That guy went away. The other insurance company went away. It's all done. Well, okay. I'll take that as an ongoing sign of grace in our midst. So that's why I say it isn't necessarily always going to be healing. And, and actually, I kind of like that there's this other dimension of things like money and walking on water. You and I got to get this walking on water thing sorted out, okay? But, but the, the walking on water and, you know, rebuking the weather and just all of that stuff. We see it in the book of Acts. Why shouldn't we see it now?

All right. So this idea of the ongoing grace is illustrated by this crippled Lystran man who was healed in Acts 14. Luke states that although this man had never walked, Paul looked at him intently. Now, in the King James and the New King James, the language is, "He fixed his gaze upon him." This is a really important ministry point. John Wimber used to teach it, and I haven't heard anyone teach it other than me, and that's not to make me great. I got it from John, but I'm keeping the tradition alive, and I'm passing it on to all of you. There's two places in the New Testament where this language occurs: "to fix your gaze upon." This is not just something like, "I decide I'm going to look at you and stare at you." This is something where the Lord draws your eye to someone, and it's like radar lock. And when you, when you fix your gaze on somebody, this is a work of the Spirit that is an indication that God is about to do something. And on multiple occasions, on all continents of the world, multiple nations, I've had this dynamic happen to me where my gaze is fixed onto somebody, and when that happens, I know something is going to occur. So Paul locks on to this guy, fixes his gaze, and when he does, he sees faith on his face. Now, when people have faith on them in order to receive, there's a certain kind of a, it's like a halo around their face. You can see it. If you remember the eclipse, it might literally look like a corona, but not as intense, around their face. Sometimes it'll look like a sheen or a flushing of the face, and you know, you can see this flushing even on black people. So this is not rated on skin tone. It's, it's rated on, it's a, it's a grace of the Holy Spirit that's telling you, "It's on right here, right now." Other times, you can just tell people are like, they're leaning forward and on the edge of their seat, and "Wow, this amazing." So you, that, you don't even need a gift of the Holy Spirit. You're just like, "Yeah, they're with me." Okay. But, but when that's happening, you want to follow that. It's a really important ministry technique. And again, I don't hear anybody teaching on this at all. I learned it from John Wimber.

So this man had faith to be sozo. Now, that's interesting because sozo is a word that means saved, but it also means healed, and it means a comprehensive encounter with God's kingdom such that the manifold graces of God, the multiplicity of all that God could do. This man could be born again, this man could be healed of his crippled condition, who knows what else he needed, but now he's living under Shalom. And so the miracle that healed this man was born of the same faith that saved this man that Paul has this encounter with in Lystra. And we might go further and say that in Luke's mind, and presumably in Paul's, because Luke is traveling with Paul, but he's recording everything, he's Paul's emanuensis, is the word, he, he's his biographer. And so, you know, Paul and Luke, they would have debriefed on this, talked about it over dinner, around the campfire, wherever they were. There's, there's little or no distinction between saving faith by which we access entrance to the kingdom of heaven and miraculous faith by which we enter into the realm of God's power. Which is to say, if we're doing our job well, and I don't think most are, including me, a lot of the time, but I'm looking to get better at it. But if we're doing our job well, there should be a convergence between salvation and miraculous breakthrough, such that those who are among the redeemed are living into breakthrough, and those who need breakthrough are coming into the kingdom. That's where we want to be.

But you know where you see this a lot? In Africa. It's amazing. I remember being in Uganda before COVID, and, um, I, I went there for one ministry, but I had a night off, and so I decided I was going to go check out this big crusade that this other guy was was leading. And someone had sent word that I was going to be there, so he kind of brought me up to the front. And he goes, "Brother, I'd like you to pray over the crowd." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, there's like, you know, 150,000 people in this meeting." Small little house meeting. And there's all across the front of the stage, there's wheelchairs, and there's crutches, and there's stretchers of people who'd already been healed. And he wants me to pray. And I'm thinking, "Oh my word, okay, well, here we go." But, you know, I felt led to give an altar call. And in the altar call, many thousands of people came forward. I mean, it's, you, you can sneeze and lead people to the Lord in Africa. But what was astounding was as people were coming forward, they were just like, and their demons were just coming out, and, you know, people were like flinging their crutches away and starting to dance and pushing their wheelchairs away like that, and just walking up the aisle and like, "Good, I don't need this anymore," because the grace that brought them salvation was the same grace that was bringing them breakthrough. And they don't have this distinction in their mind, which, which all of us have because of the teaching of our seminaries and our Western theology, that God's still saving people, but he's not still healing people. Well, that's all rubbish. It's the same language in the Bible.

So as we've already noted, the, the Greek word for miracle is dunamis, and it's the most, it's the word that is most commonly translated "power." And it's used in various places in the New Testament to say it a third time: "Does he who supplies the Holy Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith?" Well, by hearing with faith. And presumably your faith is rising. This feels like a faith-filled room, both because of what happened last night, but also that there's just something this morning that's stirring in our midst. Faith is here. All right.

And then 1 Corinthians 12:10, Paul talks about, "to another is given the gift of working of miracles, or affecting miracles, the ability to bring them about, to speak them into existence, to trigger them." Hebrews 2:4, "God bore witness to the preached word by signs and wonders, teras, and various dunamis, miracles, and by gifts, marismos, the, the cleaving asunder of the Holy Spirit, distributed according to his will." And then Hebrews 6:5, "We have tasted of the word of God and of the dunamis of the powers of the miraculous of the coming age." We are to be people of the future. We live in the presence of the future. And the kingdom has been initiated by Jesus. But one of the big problems with most theological teaching today, at most seminaries today, is that Jesus preached the kingdom, but that was kind of for then, and we don't even know if it was really true anyway, because he didn't set up his kingdom, and the whole thing kind of petered out. And I think the reason it petered out is because when the miracles start to dry up, you know, the grace is lifting. And so people kind of accepted that as normal instead of saying, "Hang on, something's wrong here. We need to call everyone back to an expectant lifestyle." And that place where breakthrough is going to become our normal place, that's where we need to be.

And so from all that, we can draw a third conclusion: Miracles and healings, um, they're not the same. And I said this last night, but they're not the same because miracles are actually indicative of something. They are indicative of the powers that will be commonplace in the future age to come, when the kingdom no longer has a "not yet" component. And so we are literally stepping into the future, and we become people who bring that to this dying world in which we live today. And so, um, miracles often have a creative dimension to them. I remember James Maloney, he's with the Lord now, but he was telling a story about how he was at a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. And it was one of those nights where the worship was off the chain. And so he's drawn and drawn in and caught up in this intense worship. And even though it was a conference, it was about a two-hour long worship set because it just sort of took off and kept going. And they were like, "Well, we'd rather do this than hear the preaching." And so they're, they're, they're caught in the vortex. And James Maloney, he described how he knelt down on the floor and presently put his head to the floor. So he's not quite prostrate, but he's bowed down, and he's in that place. And all of a sudden, he's seeing something, and he's in this hall. And he looks up, he looks in this hall, and there's all these people. And they, he can tell that he's in somewhere in Asia. And it's not East Asia. And what's happened, although he doesn't know it, is he's been transported to Central Asia. That's a miracle. Now, here's the thing: his body was still in Atlanta. People confirmed that they had visual contact with the body during this two-hour long worship set. All right. But he's in Central Asia. Turns out he's in Kazakhstan. And he knows this because as he's looking around the room, he looks over and he sees his friend over here who he knows to be a missionary to Kazakhstan. And he knows that he's in Kazakhstan at that time because he'd been communicating with him recently. And so he hadn't, you know, gotten on a plane and come back to the US. And so this missionary is leading this meeting in Kazak. This, by the way, is a true story. What I'm telling you. And I am trying to stretch you. This is, this is to try to help you reach out for this realm of miracles. So he, he, he knows that this guy is in Kazakhstan, and he's preaching. And he says, "Now we're going to have a big healing service, and my friend James over here is going to help me. So we're going to have two prayer lines." And all of a sudden, James Maloney looks and he sees Jesus. And you know the term from Star Trek, the Vulcan mind meld? Well, he and Jesus, James Maloney and Jesus, do the Vulcan body meld. And so Jesus steps into him, and now he and Jesus are one. That's kind of a biblical thought. And so the crowds start to come. And he and his friend are roughly from that point of the stage to that point of the stage apart, but they have eye contact with each other. And people are coming. And the first person who walks up to James Maloney is a woman with no arms. I don't know where they went. I don't know what happened. Was she born that way? Were they amputated, killed, or blown off in a landmine? I don't know. But anyway, she has no arms. But Jesus and, and James Maloney are one. And she stands in front of him. He lays his hands on her, and she grows arms out like that. This literally happened. Okay. Next, next, next.

And then meanwhile, back in Atlanta, the two-hour worship set is coming in for a landing. And so in the middle of this service, James Maloney vanishes, and he's back in his body in Atlanta. And he kind of gets up off the floor. He's like, "Wow, that's the craziest vision I've ever had." He doesn't look at his phone because he's worshiping. He gets up and he goes and preaches. And so later on that night, he's done with preaching in Atlanta. He goes to his hotel room. And, you know, he's getting ready for bed. He looks at his phone. And here's a text from his friend in Kazakhstan. And he goes, "Where did you go? I looked across the stage and I saw you on my right, and I saw that woman walk up and her arms grew out. And he said, "It was going off in the room there because they were in an environment of miracles, and there were many other dramatic things going on." And I looked away and I looked back, and you were gone. And suddenly your prayer line was also my prayer line because there wasn't you to help me out. Where did you go?" Well, the answer is, I went back to Atlanta to lead the service that I was supposed to be leading in Atlanta. How crazy could this get? That crazy. "Let my people go." That's where we started this thing this morning. I know some of you are like, "You've got to be kidding me." I am not kidding you. This is a true story. There's photo documentation of all of it. James Maloney was a Bible teacher at Christ for the Nations in Dallas for, I think it was 24 years, not 25, but anyway. He's known in Texas. Now he's with Jesus. But anyway.

So miracles can be creative. They also show restored dominion over nature, as we see with Jesus and the weather. I, I remember one time I flew into Washington D.C. um, and I was supposed to, you know, be preaching that weekend. And, um, the pastor calls me as soon as I'm off the plane. He goes, "Hey, Ken, you know, get your gear and get your bags, get to the get to the hotel as fast as you can. There's a snow hurricane going to hit Washington." And they're already like, the schools have been released, all the government workers have been sent home. Uh, they already have the snow plows out on the roads. We're expected to get two feet of snow tonight. We're not going to be able to hold these meetings this weekend." And I said, "Why not?" He says, "Well, 'cause we're going to have a snow hurricane and it's going to be a major blizzard." I said, "Well, why don't we rebuke the weather?" He's like, "What?" I said, "Let me get my bags and get to the hotel." So anyway, I get to the hotel. And I call him back. And I, I never ever turn on the TV in my hotel room. I'm not a TV watcher. And I never know what's going to come through the screen anyway. So I'm like, "Just better not to turn it on." But that day, I did. I flicked it on. I found the Weather Channel. And I click on the Weather Channel. And I'm watching the Doppler radar. This snow hurricane is coming up from the southeast this way, headed to Washington D.C. I'm on the phone with my friend. I said, "In the name of Jesus Christ, we take authority over this storm. We deny you the ability to touch landfall." And I'm watching the Doppler radar. And this storm turns and heads due east out to sea. Not a flake fell. So we had our meetings anyway. And I don't remember the total count, but I do remember there was one woman in a wheelchair who got healed and went home pushing her wheelchair. She was fine. And there was somebody else who had a short limb, not quite the same as growing one out. Den.

noo but you know you got to start somewhere. um, the short limb and it was a short arm was like, you know, this short. so that arm grew out. um, somebody with a heart condition and they thought needed a heart transplant. the Lord touched them and they were knocked out by the Holy Spirit. they went to the hospital the following week for the kind of pre-prep, you know, pre-surgery prep stuff. and when they did the scan, they were like, you're you have a new heart. did you, did you already have surgery? so I don't know what happened there, but something happened there.

so this is dominion over nature. we are supposed to have this. in fact, I don't know if you caught it, but when Jesus rebuked the wind and the waves, what did he say to his disciples? where is your faith? now, I don't know how often this can happen, but probably a lot more than zero, which is where most of us were kind of right, just barely above zero. 0.01, right? so let's at least get to 0.05 or, you know, 0.5 or how about 1.2? I, I mean, I don't know. but you can see where I'm going with this, right?

what I do know is we have this passage in Ephesians, Ephesians 3:20. it's one of my favorite verses in the Bible. unto him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we can even ask or think, according to the power at work within us. so let's go beyond what we can think of. let's, let's take the blinders off. let's take the wraps off and say, oh God, let us live in the realm of miracles.

miracles can change the essence of a thing. now, we often talk about this. well, you know, the new birth is the greatest miracle of all. well, it is in the sense that, you know, people are not going to go and suffer eternal torment in hell. and people are transformed from being enemies of God to the children of God, sons and daughters of God. but there is also this dimension in which miracles change the essence of a thing.

I remember this one friend of mine. she'd been in Thailand for a revival that was breaking out in Bangkok. and she messaged me and said, hey, I'm coming to Los Angeles. and I picked up something in Bangkok. and I'm thinking, well, don't bring it here. I don't, I don't want your Thailand flu, right? she goes, um, so in, in Bangkok, they have this thing going on where when they hold communion, they bring in water bottles like this. she didn't go into all this. I'm explaining it more fully, but they, they bring in water bottles like this. and, uh, and they'll just bring in like a single loaf of bread. but when they have a, or not a loaf, a slice, a single slice of bread. and when they have a communion service, they ask the Lord to give them bread and wine. and in a sealed water bottle, it turns from clear to red. we crack it open and it's wine. because Jesus used wine for communion. I know that offends some, but it is true. and so did Paul. and, and I know all the historical arguments about why and the water wasn't safe to drink and yada yada yada. but the bottom line, they were drinking wine for communion. and, uh, and, you know, they have a meeting and they have one slice of bread, but they have enough bread for everybody to have a pretty good sized chunk of bread.

and so she goes, so I'm coming to LA, um, and I'm going to go to this meeting across the city. but I thought maybe I'd come and visit you and maybe we could have a meeting at your house. and I said, all right. so I gathered a few friends. and so, um, she sort of telling her stories. so I said, hey, you know about that water turned to wine thing? and could, could we do that? she goes, you got a water bottle? you have a water bottle? this is America, right? of course, everybody has a pantry full of water bottles that they bought at Costco. so all right, we get a water bottle. and I get a half a slice of bread. and so she is about to pray over the bread. and she opens her Bible. and there has bread multiplied in the Bible. and it's falling out. than with my own eyes, I saw this. and it's unleavened bread. the bread I brought out was leavened. so I don't know, should we always take communion with unleavened bread? is God indicating a preference? I don't know.

so then she takes the water bottle and she goes, Lord, do here what you did in Thailand. and everyone in the room watched the clear water turn red. and I mean, red like that on the Walker there, red. and I'm like, is, are you a magician? so she cracks open the bottle. and I, whoa, that is wine. so we took communion with manna that fell out of her Bible that was unleavened. and wine that had been converted in a plastic sealed bottle of water like I'm holding in my hand. this happened in my living room with my friend who was carrying something that came out of Thailand at a revival meeting there. and it stayed with her for several weeks. and then it kind of lifted. and she hasn't seen it happen now. but she probably held 20 or 30 communion services where this occurred in the aftermath of that service.

so miracles change the essence of a thing. miracles may allow people to travel great distances or to walk through walls. I have one friend. well, let's talk about that first. so Jesus, um, he walked through walls, right? hi guys, what's up? it's a ghost. no, it's just me. hey, you got some fish to eat, right? so we, we have that story. and we have the story of it says, immediately the boat was on the other side. so something happened. and there we are. all right.

but you know, during the Indonesian revival, a guy named Mel Tari, he talked about being transported in the spirit, walking across rivers and not falling into them. so something's going on when you can walk on water. there's some sort of phase transformation. I don't know how it gets explained scientifically, but it is what it is. so miracles can allow that.

miracles are a glimpse into what a fully redeemed, glorified humanity will be like. and with that, I want to hypothesize that when we experience these miracles, we're actually also looking backward in time to what we were like in Eden, the capabilities we had but were lost in the fall.

all right. so, um, when we looked at the book of Acts, we saw the dynamic interplay between grace and miracles as miracles accompany the preaching of the gospel and the coming of grace to those who receive the gospel. but the outpouring of grace that, uh, Paul and Barnabas witnessed wasn't the result of great exertions or arm twisting. instead, it was the free choice of God to release miracles to confirm proper apostolic preaching for no reason other than Jesus said he would do it. and he actually says it in Matthew 28:20. lo, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

well, these are the very things Jesus did. so if he's with us, would we expect that we're getting what the version B of Jesus? I mean, this is the Jesus who rose from the grave, who's now glorified and ascended. I would expect, if anything, it would be an upgrade, not a downgrade. but we've been taught to expect the downgrade of Jesus. ah, you know, Jesus is weak now. and now that we have the Bible, he, you know, he kind of forgot how to move in all of that. but he said, I will be with you to the end of time. that includes 2024, last I checked, because time hasn't ended yet.

and then I know it's a little more controversial, Mark 16:20, the ending of Mark. but nevertheless, uh, it says the Lord worked with them. just in case there's any ambiguity about what Matthew meant. the Lord worked with them as they preached the gospel. and by the way, that is given to all who believe. not just the 12 apostles, not just to the 72. it's to you, and to you, and to you. can you accept that? it might require shifting some things off of things that you've been told in the past? because what's happened is really, over the years, American Christianity has really built bulwarks, walls around a theology of unbelief. and I don't want to live in that anymore. I want the true and the real. I want more Georges coming off their oxygen. right? I want more Laurens being touched by the Lord and saying, yeah, my knees are feeling better. and by golly, I'm walking better. I want more of that, not less. I want to see ALS healed reliably. bring them all. we're going to have an ALS healing service and have a realistic expectation of dozens of people not sentenced to death because they got a diagnosis. isn't that what you want? far beyond, beyond all that we ask or think. yes.

and so one of the profound lessons that we learned from the pages of the New Testament, Ephesians 2:8-10, is that by grace, by the divine energy of God, we are saved because we believe. because we have confidence in the message. we have confidence in Jesus. but even that faith is not our own doing. that faith is itself given to us as a gift. it's not a result of works, so no one can boast about how great they are. we are his workmanship. we are created unto good works, miraculous works in Christ Jesus, which God prepared before the beginning of the world for us to walk in. I think a lot of people have taken less than their full inheritance. and so miracles are part of that good works package for which we are created.

John Wimber used to say that most of the miracles he saw had a sense of quietness around them. I kind of talked about this last night. or maybe a sense of calm. so this is not something we can stir up in the flesh and make it happen. and I think one of the big problems that's happening, it's particularly acute in Pentecostal circles. in a Presbyterian church, there's no expectation, so nothing's going to happen, right? but, but in Pentecostal circles, it's like, well, we used to have this. and come on, everybody, let's praise the Lord harder. come on. yeah. and, you know, they're, they're trying to make this occur. that doesn't work either. so both are the wrong extreme. there's this zone in the middle that's where we want to be.

and so the fourth lesson we can learn about miracles is that they happen when we rest in God's power, God's grace, and then they flow out of the grace of God we've already received. and so we step into the realm of miracles simply by living in the grace of God. it's not that hard, is it? now, it might be harder in execution because we all have a tendency to strive and get in the flesh. and, but if, if we can kind of put all that down and crucify the flesh, as we say, well, there we go.

so how are we going to summarize all this? number one, miracles initiate and confirm the initial preaching of the gospel wherever it may be going on. could be overseas, but it could be right here in Lodi or in Abilene or wherever else we've designated as our, as our theater of operations. number two, miracles should continue on when we live in the grace of God. they should be part of the normal Christian life. number three, miracles show us a glimpse of the new man or the new woman that we are destined to become because we are recapturing the dominion that we lost in Eden when Satan deceived us and usurped our position. number four, miracles flow from living in the grace of God, not through great exertions.

and so if we want to summarize Galatians 3:1-6, I think we might say, begin in faith, continue in faith, and reap miracles like Abraham. there we go. all right. well, it's 12:08. we have a 2:00 session. we're going to break for lunch. no ministry time right now, but we will have an extended ministry time after the, uh, afternoon session. will go from 2:00 until 6:00. so I don't know that I'll preach for two hours, but I'll bring a last message, and then we'll have ministry until 6:00 PM. and so, um, you know, come ready to party and let's see what the Lord's going to do. all right. [Applause]