December 22, 2024, Message by P. Kevin Clancey
Who have I in heaven but you? Besides you, I desire nothing on earth. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God, you’re the strength of my life and my portion forever.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? I desire you more than anything on earth.26 My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever. (Psalms 73:25-26, NLT)
Descend to us. Lord Jesus, come and be with us. It would be a silly thing to do, church without inviting your presence. There are better things to do on a Sunday night. But, Lord, if you are here, then there’s nothing better to do. This is the greatest investment we can make with our lives.
And so, Holy Spirit, come bring the presence of Jesus and Lord, may the words of my mouth, the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, our Rock, our Strength, and our Redeemer. Amen.
All right, dear ones. Hey, good to see you again. Merry Christmas. I’m glad you brought your dear mother with you. She’s a nice lady. We like her here.
All right, so this is going to be a little autobiographical. We’re going through the Bible in a year, as you know, and we’re going to be in Second Timothy tonight.
Chapter one, verses six and seven, which are. I just want to let you know, it’s kind of like the theme verse or the life verse of the firehouse church. This is why the firehouse church came into existence, because of this verse. And I’m going to have to share some of my biographical information to help that make sense to you. So hopefully that won’t be too boring if I tell a little bit of my story. But anyway, here’s how the verse goes. 2 Timothy 1:6.
Paul writing to Timothy, and he says this.
6 This is why I remind you to fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you when I laid my hands on you. 7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline. (2 Timothy 1:6-7, NLT)
And God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts. I already prayed that, didn’t I? Be acceptable in your heart.
Well, you can pray it twice, you know. God, you know, I don’t know if God’s not hard of hearing, but you can pray things twice.
All right, so this is the theme verse of the Firehouse Church. And, you know, you might have a theme verse. Anybody got, you know, a verse you’d like to say as your life verse? I don’t have. I have life verses. I have just ones that constantly are with me. you’ve probably heard most of them, of course. The one nearest and dearest to my heart is Proverbs 11:23.
23Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.(Proverbs11:23, NLT)
Just touches me every time. But you’ve heard me say, you’ve heard me probably almost every Sunday. Psalm 73:25-26, and certainly Psalm 27:13 has been with me for a long time.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? I desire you more than anything on earth. 26 My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever. (Psalm 73:25-26, NLT)
13 Yet I am confident I will see the Lord’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living. (Psalm 27:13, NLT)
I would have lost hope, except for this, that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Just the other day I was walking through the house and I started praying. Proverbs 3:5-6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he’ll make your paths straight.
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. 6 Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. (Proverbs 3:5-6, NLT)
And the verse that the speaker used that really brought me to faith in Christ. Revelation 3:20. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and sup with him and him with me.
20 “Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends. (Revelation 3:20, NLT)
And there’s just other verses you might have, you know, just some of your own that just kind of stick with you. But this one became key to me partly because of my Christian experience and partly because it just of things that I saw that were good, different segments of the church and things that I saw that were concerning in different segments of the church. And basically, when it comes to Christianity in the 20th and early.
Late 20th and early 21st century, over the last 50 years, I resemble the Johnny Cash song. I’ve been everywhere, man. I’ve been everywhere.
I grew up Roman Catholic, and so I grew up in a very sacramental environment. And the Bible says in Proverbs, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I learned the fear of the Lord growing up in the Catholic Church. And not in a bad way necessarily. I mean, I really got a sense of the transcendence and holiness of God.
What I didn’t get and what I ended up resenting, though, I’ve forgiven them now because maybe I just wasn’t listening. But what I didn’t get is I didn’t get this idea that I could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through faith. I didn’t get that.
You know, I just go, you know, take communion, go to confession, jump through all the hoops, and you’re good. And then I went as a high schooler, I went to a camp put on by young Life, and young Life is an evangelical outreach to high school students.
And I did not go to that camp to get to know Jesus. I went to that camp because my counselor told me there were three girls for every boy. And I knew I needed those odds.
And so I went to camp to see if I could, you know, make an impression on the girls, which I never did. But what happened is I got caught.
This speaker got up and he talked, and he started talking about Jesus and how God sent him into the world and how he died on the cross, and that God wanted to have a relationship with me.
He wanted to forgive my sins. And somehow that just all sounded new to me. And this, this phrase, this verse, behold, I stand at the door and knock. Well, I didn’t give my life to Jesus at that camp because I knew the camp was a setup, all right?
I knew it was set up to make me give my life to Jesus. And I have always been. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’ve always been a contrarian. All right? You know, I just like. If you say the sky is blue, I say, well, what do you mean by blue? You know, I just. I don’t know. That’s just. It’s good and it’s bad.
So I didn’t give my life to Jesus right away, but I did pray this prayer at that camp. I went off by myself and I said, God, if this is really you knocking when I get home away from this spiritual setup, keep knocking, keep knocking. And he did.
And two weeks later, without a counselor, without any hype, without anybody there, just late at night, I gave my life to Christ. And that launched me into what we would call evangelicalism, so catholic to evangelical. A lot of people made that.
And the thing about evangelicalism is this. The Bible, know the Bible, learn the Bible, it’s the Word of God.
And then have a quiet time every day, Read your Bible, say your prayers, and you’ll be good and find a bible believing church. And so I just launched into that. And then I became a young life leader. And my early church, I wasn’t much about churches, but my early. My church was young life. You know, hanging out with my young life friends and going on campus and leading kids to Christ was very exciting. It’s very wonderful. And I just gained a lot through that.
I mean, they didn’t teach me everything, but those things they taught me, have a quiet time, Read your Bible, say your prayers. I didn’t everything, but it’s something. It’s good, it’s good. All right. And so. But one night, one of my young life friends, this lady came by the house. And she had met a Pentecostal at work, she was a nurse. Met a Pentecostal lady at church and she was just all on fire. And this Pentecostal lady had prayed for her and she had started praying in tongues.
Well, I’d read about that and stuff because I read my Bible. In fact, one of the things that young Life did for me is I read my Bible and I kept wondering, why doesn’t this stuff happen today? You know, why is it not the same?
And so this lady said, oh yeah, she prayed for me and I prayed in tongues and I want to take you to her house. And I said, okay, I’ll go. And so we went and we get in the car. She goes, I don’t know where she lives.
I go, well, Chico’s a big town. It’s a big college town. She goes, I kind of know where she lives. I go, okay.
So we went to the kind of neighborhood and we’re driving around the neighborhood and she just prayed, Lord, if you want Kevin to meet these people tonight, show me her car. And like five seconds later you go, there it is, that’s your car.
So we pull in the driveway, it’s 9:00 at night. We knock on the door, we wake up this old Pentecostal couple. Why? Because old Pentecostals go to bed early.
They’re not drinking and carousing or nothing. They just go to bed early and get up so they can get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and pray to Jesus.
And so he woke them up. But they were not the least bit grumpy. They were just filled with joy. Because my friend said, I brought Kevin here, he wants to get prayed for, to receive the Holy Spirit.
I said, well, I didn’t say that. You said, you’re going to take me to meet this lady. And they were on that like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat. I mean, they were just all over that.
And so they gave me this list of things that I needed to denounce, or I wouldn’t receive the gift of the Spirit. By the way, that list was worthless. I didn’t denounce everything on that list. It had stuff that I didn’t believe, and they never tested me on it. They never asked me, did you denounce all that? But in my mind, it’s like, well, no.
I mean, one of the things I had to denounce was that there’s any truth in any other world religion. Well, as a religious studies major at Chico State, there’s all sorts of truth in other religions, just not the truth. It all falls short of Jesus.
But, I mean, a lot of other religions tell you to be good. And so, you know, I didn’t denounce all that stuff, but they never tested me on it. And then they said, all right, get on your knees. We’re going to lay our hands on you.
We’re going to pray. They said, great. And they said, just start praising God in English till you run out of words. Done. And they started praying to me. Not the way my young life friends prayed. Okay? My young life friends were the just prayers, you know, the evangelical just prayers.
Lord, we just want you to come. We just love you so much. you’re just so good. God, just touch Kevin now. Just. Just answer, you know, just reveal your Word to us. And I don’t know why just is used as a.
And, you know, if you pray that way, that’s fine. It’s just something we learn in our culture, the just prayers. But they didn’t pray like that. They were. No, they were, and they didn’t wait.
You know, when we prayed in an evangelical prayer circle, one person prayed at a time. We took turns. Not these people. Not these people.
Oh, Jesus. Hallelujah, Jesus, Holy Spirit, come. Hallelujah, Jesus, send your fire. I’m both going. They’re both going. They’re interspersing English and this other language and. And left stuff like this.
It didn’t bother me. It didn’t really. It didn’t bother me. I thought, well, this is kind of lovely of them that they would wake up in the middle of the night and want to do this for me. And so I just began to pray. They said, pray in English until you run out of words, you know.
Praise Jesus. Said, well, Jesus, I praise you. Jesus, I thank you. you’re a great savior. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for dying on the cross.
And, you know, you run out of that pretty quick in English, you know. It’s like, okay, Jesus, you’re really, really good. I mean, you’re really good. you’re super good. you’re the good Es, you know.
And so I’m praying in English, you know, and Lord, I love you, and I thank you, and these people are sweet. And, Lord, whatever you want to do tonight, man, whatever you want to do. I don’t know if I call God, man. I do those sometimes, so. Whatever you want to do, God, you know. And Lord, I love you.
I praise you. I didn’t stop for 24 hours. I mean, I went to bed that night praying in tongues. I woke up the next morning praying in tongues.
I called Jill, my fiance at the time. I said, Jill, you know, I just started praying in tongues. That is not the first call that she has gotten from me that has made her think, all right, am I sure about this man that I’m going to spend my life with?
Yeah, we’re going to leave Oakdale and move to Washington. Am I sure about this man? But she’s still with me. Bless her heart.
All right, so then I. So I kind of joined into that kind of the Charismatic Pentecostal, and I started reading books on it, and I started getting involved in it, and I. And then I really got involved in it and had some experiences and, you know, had some experiences in the early 2000s where I was prayed for a couple times, fell to the ground, started shaking, and again shook for 24 hours.
That was in 2003. It’s now almost 2025. I still shake. Not, I mean, again, I shake for 24 hours straight, but I still shake. When I’m praying and walking through some place, I’m walking through a city, and maybe just prayer walking or prayer walking in a neighborhood, my right hand begins to shake. If I try to stop it, I can. And then my left hand, I can’t make them both stop at the same time. And I get the one hand clap.
Sometimes I just get a shot, like a jolt, and I just. Boom. It’s kind of like Holy Spirit Tourette’s. Oh. And, you know, sometimes I’ll be laying in bed with my wife, and I’ll, you know, I’ll jolt. And she goes, you’re praying, aren’t you? I go, yeah.
It’s kind of handy, though, because when I do it, I can kind of swatter. And she just thinks I’m being holy and praying, you know. I’m sorry, hon. I was praying. Love you, babe.
All right, so I know. Isn’t that fun? Pray that you marry a fun man one day. Amen. All right, so. And I started hanging around with the Pentecostals, and in the middle of that, I became an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church on the west coast.
I was deeply immersed, though I never bought into it, with what we would call theological liberalism. And, you know, the whole. Well, you don’t even want to know the levels of craziness.
But I learned something good there, too, because they were really big on justice, and I read through my Bible, and they were right. God cares about the poor.
And God cares how we treat the poor, and God cares how we treat the oppressed. And they were right about those things. They were wrong about most everything else, in my estimation. So I’ve been everywhere, and here was my conundrum, all right? Here was my issue.
I loved my evangelical roots. I loved my Catholic roots. I loved the kind of the communion and the holiness of God and the mystery and the sacraments. And I loved the Word and the Bible and the discipleship.
That was a part of that whole evangelical thing that I grew up in. But I love the excitement and the power and the immediacy of the presence of the Spirit in the Charismatic church. And yet in all those groups, it seemed like they would never embrace it all.
And I thought, these things are not mutually exclusive, right? I would run into these charismatics, and I loved them. I’d go to these conferences, and the minute the music started, I just loved it. They’d be up front and they’d have their flags, and they were waving.
You didn’t have to coax anybody. They were just hungry for God. But then I started to kind of deal with them in some ways, and it’s like a lot of them were flaky, right? A lot of them, you know, would prophesy every other minute, and they would never check out to see if any of those things ever came true.
And everybody’s so thrilled. Oh, they’re prophesying. They’re prophesying. Well, you know what? It ain’t prophecy unless it happens. you’re just kidding yourselves. And here’s what I saw.
I saw an excuse not to pursue discipleship and instead replace it with spiritual encounters. And it’s like, no, no. Because you got slain in the Spirit four times doesn’t mean you get to short circuit reading your Bible and saying your prayers. It doesn’t mean you can divorce your husband because the Lord told you that the rules don’t apply to you, just to everybody else.
And it’s like, why don’t you get a job, too, and keep one? I mean, not. I’m caricaturing, not everybody at all was like this.
But if you’ve been around Charismatic Pentecostal circles for a while, right, you meet some, right, Kathleen? Well, okay, maybe you haven’t met any. Well, I have. Bless your heart. You just think well of everybody.
And I would go to evangelical churches, and I would start to explain to them some of the experience I had. Oh, yeah, this guy at the Brownsville Revival prayed for me, and I went down to the ground. And I was laying there for 40 minutes. Oh, that’s the devil. Really? Why is that the devil?
Well, because God’s given you a spirit of self control. It’s like, well, wait, Daniel fell down when the angel appeared to him. John fell down when Jesus appeared to him in the Book of Revelation. In fact, people fall all the time in the Bible.
And the person who prayed for me was not praying a demonic prayer. And then I started praying for people and they started falling down. And here, literally here was the prayer I was praying most the time when people were falling down.
Heavenly Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus, send your spirit. And people would fall. A lot of them were good evangelicals. And they’d say, you know, Pastor, I just want to let you know I don’t fall. They’d say, fine.
Heavenly Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus, ascend to your Holy Spirit. Till now. Well, there you go. And that just started happening. And I just came to the conclusion it wasn’t the devil.
And I came upon this verse, and a friend of mine named Michael Sullivan wrote a great chapter in one of his books, Prophetic Etiquette, about this verse. And he really talked about these three: power, love, and a sound mind. And I thought, that’s it. That’s what Holy Spirit fullness looks like.
Holy Spirit looks like the power of God working through believing saints filled with the love of God. Because without love, we’re just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. All right? And yet sound discipleship. We think about things, we reflect on things.
We’re grown ups in the faith. We don’t stay children. And I thought, why not? And I thought, man, we’re going to go to Washington and plant a church like that. People are going to run to that church. A few skipped in. Mm. But you know what? I can’t leave it. I can’t leave it because I can’t abandon any one of those three legs. They all seem to me to be about the fullness of what it means to walk in fellowship with Jesus, the power of the Spirit.
And so I want to look at these words, and then I want to look at what happens when we don’t have all three of those. But the first word. Actually, there are four things. The first word is, you’ve not received a spirit of fear.
And I want to say, you will never walk in power, love, and a sound mind if you have fear. Because courage is the foundation of all virtues. Courage is the ability not to quit when the going gets tough.
And if you want to pursue Jesus in his power, in his love, or in discipleship, there’s going to be tests, there’s going to be roadblocks. It’s going to be tough at times to do it. you’re going to be challenged. And if you don’t have courage, you’ll quit.
Paul didn’t want to take Mark on the second missionary journey. Why? He quit. Barnabas, whose name means son of encouragement, said no, we’re going to take him again because we’re going to give him more courage this time. Barnabas ended up being right.
Mark ended up being very useful to both Peter and Paul later in his ministry. But encourage means to help the Holy Spirit. We get the Spirit from the Holy Spirit comes and lives in us. And he gives us the courage to be witnesses for Jesus all the way to the finish line. We don’t quit.
Every other virtue depends upon courage because we will never practice a virtue when it gets difficult if we don’t have courage. It takes courage. I’ve been married 43 years. It takes courage to be married a long time. Easier to quit.
It takes courage to hang in there and be a father. Easier to quit. It takes courage to love people over a long distance of time. Easier to quit. Courage. The Bible says when the Holy Spirit comes upon us, we get boldness.
Boldness is regularly mentioned in the Book of Acts as evidence of the Holy Spirit filling us. Boldness to proclaim the Gospel. Boldness to live the Christian life in the midst of a world that doesn’t want us to live the Christian life in front of people who don’t want us to live the Christian life.
And dear ones, we can have courage. Because I said earlier, we’re playing a game we’ve already won. We’re playing a game. We’ve already won. Jesus Christ died on the cross. Our sins are forgiven. He rose from the dead.
He brought us to himself. He gave us his spirit. And in this world we have troubles. But take heart. Take courage. I have overcome the world. And I just want to say this to you tonight in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. You cannot lose if you do not quit. That’s it.
You cannot lose if you do not quit. You will make mistakes. you’ll do things that years later you’ll do this. You go, why did I say that? Why did I do that? All right. But God will never quit on you and allow the Spirit to give you a spirit that’s not timid, but that’s bold.
One of the great reasons we go to church is so that we do not get discouraged. Instead, we get encouraged. Somebody once asked me, they said, what hero of the Bible do you want your life to emulate?
Well, the obvious answer is Jesus. I’ll take, you know, but they said, no, no, no, no fair. You got to take another one. I said, okay, you know, Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel, Samuel, Peter, Paul, John, you know, who do you want to emulate?
And I said, I’ll take. I’m go second tier. I’m not going to go top tier. I’m going to go second tier. I want to emulate Barnabas. I want to be the son of encouragement. In fact, I pray regularly at this season in my life. I pray just three things.
There are other virtues I want, but these are the three that are just on my heart. I said, Lord, would you give me kindness, encouragement, and wisdom? So I pray that when you come in here on Sunday night and we encounter one another and, you know, we encourage one another.
But I pray that these words that I speak up here would encourage, give you courage. The Holy Spirit would use them to bring courage. you’ve not received a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power. You have got power, man.
The Bible talks about power in some pretty big ways. It says he wants to fill us with all the fullness of God. He wants to fill us with the power that raised Jesus from the dead. He wants to fill us with power. And one of our issues is, well, if he does, why don’t we see more of it? I don’t know, but I think one of the reasons we don’t see more of it is we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it. In the Western world especially, we have a hard time believing it.
We’ve been taught a naturalistic worldview that says everything can be explained by biology, chemistry, and physics, and that the supernatural, the power of God invading the natural, is not possible. That’s the God of the gaps. We’ll find out why that happened, and we’ll just explain it away.
But people, I’ve seen stuff you can’t explain away. I mean, we got a famous miracle a year ago, but just this morning at the firehouse church, Celia Grice, who’s been a part of that church forever, she’s a mom. She’s got three kids, single mom, three kids.
And several years ago, those three kids were real little. And Celia wrote on Facebook, she said, I’m stricken with terrible migraine headaches, and the only relief I get is by going into a dark room. But as a mother with three small children, I have, you know, I don’t have that opportunity. And I thought, oh, poor Celia. And I began to pray. I said, lord, I just pray that Celia would get help. I didn’t know that about her. She never told me about that.
A couple weeks later, Celia’s sitting in church, and I’m just preaching like this, and I’m just talking. And all of a sudden, it was one of those moments where the Holy Spirit said, okay, stop talking.
So. And it’s like, well, God, what do you. You know? I’m talking. Stop. I got something to do. And so right now, and this has happened a couple times, we’re right in the middle of the sermon, it’s like, oop, I gotta stop talking. And God says, I want you to tell Celia that I’m gonna heal her.
And I was just sitting right where you were, Isaiah. I just looked at her and I said, Celia, I believe the Lord is gonna heal you of those migraines. Her eyes got really big. She kind of smiled.
All right, keep talking. Finish my sermon. I read on. Celia is really shy, so she didn’t even tell me this. I read it on Facebook, and here’s what her Facebook message says. It says, two things happened to me recently. She said, first I realized, be careful what you post on social media. your pastor is reading.
Good point. And then she told the story about how she had said she’d had these migraine headaches, that I had stopped in the middle of the service and prayed for the migraines to go away.
And she said, here, I’ve been a Christian and raised in church my whole life, and I never even thought to pray about that. So when he said that, I went home and I prayed that God would remove my migraine headaches. That was probably six, seven years ago.
She was in church this morning as I shared that story, and I just looked at her. I said, Celia, migraine’s still gone. She hasn’t had one since.
That’s power. That’s power. God’s power to heal the sick. God’s power to cast out devils. God’s power to raise the dead. God’s power to proclaim the gospel.
God gives us power to become like Jesus in character, the fruit of the Spirit. He gives us power to become like Jesus in ministry, the gifts of the Spirit. Supernatural Christianity is normal Christianity.
Read Craig Keener’s book called Miracles Just. And it’s the 400-page version, not the 2000-page version. He has a 2000-page version of nothing but verified, chronicled, doctor-witnessed, people-witnessed miracles.
80% of the conversions in Africa, which is quickly becoming the Christian continent as we speak tonight, happen not through simple presentation of the gospel, but through a miraculous answer to prayer or a healing or a deliverance of someone.
The power of God does not convert people. It gains a hearing. But in the West, we’re afraid of it. In the West, we’re afraid of it. The Holy Spirit broke out in our church in California, and people started dropping and flopping and praying. I just thought it was great. And you know what? Our church got smaller, not bigger. I thought it was going to get bigger, you know, but.
Well, Pastor, I just don’t like this dog and pony show. What do you want me to do? Not pray for people or pray for people and say, okay, I’m going to pray for you, but you can’t fall down. Like, what do you want me to do?
Well, take that stuff into the back room. We don’t want to see it. And I said, no, I’m not going to do it. Well, I’m going to leave. All right? And then in the love of Christ, I just want to say, don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you. Bye. Bye. I probably could have said it nicer. I actually don’t think I ever said that to anybody’s face. But I said it to where the good Lord split them as they were walking out. Don’t let the door hit you. All right?
Supernatural Christianity is normal Christianity. It’s not extraordinary Christianity. We all get the Holy Spirit. You did not get the 99 cent value meal version of the Holy Spirit. And some anointed preacher got the real deal. You got the real deal.
Well, how do I operate in that? Try. What if I fail? Keep trying. Keep trying. Keep believing. Believe God’s word more than your experience and go for it. I don’t know how much of the kingdom of God we can see on earth, but I bet we can see more.
Why? you’ve not received a spirit of timidity, but of power. Don’t miss the gift because you’re offended by the package. All right? I was very offended when I first became a Christian by televangelists. All the swoopy hair, the elaborate sets, and the drama and the hype.
It just offended me so much. But I was fascinated, too. And I was fascinated by Benny Hinn. And a lot of people just don’t like Benny Hinn. But I didn’t. To this day, I don’t think he’s a great preacher. All right, sorry, Benny, but here’s the deal.
I’d watch him and he’d put his hands on people say touch. And they’d fall and he’d look up to the choir and go, touch. And he’d wave his jacket and 3/4 of the choir would fall. And my evangelical friends would say, well, that is mass hypnotism, that’s delusion or that’s the devil. Or they were all trained to do that.
And none of those, as I thought through that, I thought, I don’t, those don’t really work for me. I don’t think you could convince 3/4 of the choir to just fall into their chairs.
People, you know, western people are too, they got too much kind of self-respect for that. And then one day I’m watching, and I was criticizing, as I usually did, and a little girl came up, and her fingers were all crippled up with arthritis. Little 10-year-old girl just crippled with arthritis.
And Benny Hinn says to his mother, he says, I believe the Lord’s going to heal her today. And she goes, good. She goes, I brought him to one of your services four years ago, and nothing happened.
It didn’t happen, but I brought her back because I just, I just, you know, my little girl is crippled with arthritis. And Benny Hinn says, in the Name of Jesus, you know, be healed or arthritis leave or something like that.
This little girl started stretching out her fingers and she just started crying and her mother started crying. And Benny Hinn said, could she do this before? She said she hadn’t done that in years. And they were both just crying.
And you know what I was doing? I stopped criticizing and I was crying. I was crying. And then I heard the voice of God, Jamie, I heard the voice of God. And here’s what he said. He said, Kevin, does anything like that happen in your ministry? And I said, no, it doesn’t. He says, do you want it to? And I said with all my heart.
What kind of monster wouldn’t want to be able to heal a little girl crippled with arthritis? Of course I would want that. Of course I would want that. So with all my heart, Lord. And he said, stop criticizing then and learn. Gotcha.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I believe everything some charismatic Pentecostal preacher preaches, every piece of doctrine they espouse. But it does mean that set me on a lifetime journey to walk in the fullness of the power of God, to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Why? Because you’ve received a spirit of power, and you’ve received a spirit of love. God’s power is his tool belt of love. That’s how we love people, by operating in the gifts of the Spirit.
We love people by operating in the gift of encouragement or by operating in the gift of service. We maybe intercede for people by operating in the gift of tongues. We might prophesy for people and give them hope and encouragement and edification, which is what New Testament prophecy is for. And it’s how we love one another.
We love God by serving and obeying him. And we love one another by making them more important than ourselves and serving them with the gifts that God has given us. And dear ones, you even got to love yourself. All right?
And I know this is counter to worm theology. Oh, I’m just such a sinful worm. I’m so terrible. Yeah, so is everybody else. Get over it. God forgave you.
The New Testament doesn’t talk a lot about. I mean, Paul says I’m the worst of all sinners, but God had mercy on me. But it doesn’t dwell there. The New Testament dwells on what Child of God, Saints, royal priesthood, temple, you know, it just, it focuses on those kinds of things.
Don’t let the devil beat you up constantly. Worm theology. Yes. you’re a sinner. you’ve been forgiven. Get over it. you’re forgiven now. you’re a child of God.
Often when I pray for people, I get a mental picture in my mind. It’s the most common mental picture I get when I pray for people, and that is of the Lord Jesus standing behind them and putting a crown on their heads. Or a tiara for women. I’ve never seen, you know, I never seen men get a tiara.
All right, so, Troy, I never saw Jesus put a little tiara on you, but a crown. A crown. And what that says to me is this, Prince, princess, you know what the Bible says? We don’t know what we’ll be like, but we will be like him. Him. That’s our destiny.
You’re not going to be forever. This just this worthless worm, saved by grace. you’re saved by grace to be like our big brother Jesus. Embrace that. Thank him for it. And if you don’t recognize it about yourself, at least recognize it about the person sitting next to you. But it’s good to recognize it about yourself, too.
I mean, how many of us have had these kind of thoughts? This is me. This is biographical, really. I look out at all y’all. Alright? In case you’re from the south, are you guys? Because my wife’s from New Jersey. I look out at y’all and I. And I have no problem. I have no problem at all.
It is not hard for me at all to fathom that the God of the universe, through his son Jesus Christ, died on the cross for you, sent his Holy Spirit for you, and loves you deeply.
I have no problem believing that. I just look at you and I think, well, you’re lovable. I mean, when I look at you, I don’t think worm. I don’t think, oh, what a wretched sinner. You know, Sophia, I don’t think that of you. I mean, yeah, I mean, anybody who says thank you, that demure and polite can’t be that, you know? And so.
But then I look at me and what I think, oh, well, you know, the rules are that if I confess with my mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in my heart, God raised him from the dead, I’ll be saved.
9 If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9, NLT)
Well, Lord, you’re Lord. I believe in my heart that you were raised. So I’m saved. But I know you’re doing it grudgingly. I know you’re doing it because you know, all right. You know, all right, Kev, you get in by legal contract. Come on in. But you know what? It’s not true. It’s not true.
Just like I think about you, what I think about you, you probably think about me. What I think about you, you probably think it’s not that hard for God to love.
Kev, I was going down there, people. I was sinking. I was sinking. You know, if you’re like the final one, it is a sound mind. Sophronomos. Tough word to translate in the Greek. So my commentaries say, and it’s been translated as a sound mind, self-control, self-discipline.
I think that the word really simply means soundness or discipleship, means being a grown-up, maturing.
God has given you a spirit that matures. All right. Don’t stay. You know, the New Testament says we’re to be like children, but it also says, don’t remain a babe in the faith. Grow up into the fullness of Christ.
Be intentional about your walk with Jesus, alright? Follow him, listen to him, read his word, practice a long obedience in the same direction. Anybody can have a spiritual thrill, thrills and chills as the Spirit fills. It’s one thing to get prayed for and go down, but what really is important is how did you get up?
How did you get up? When you walk out that door, you’re going to be more like Jesus than when you walked in. That’s the goal. A disciple is a disciplined learner. We have disciplines to our Christian life. Disciplines aren’t bad. Disciplines are being intentional about the things that matter to us.
Listen, if you want to get rich, don’t play the lottery. Spend less than you make and invest it. All right? That works better. More people got rich that way than playing the lottery. All right? Am I right, Brian? Okay, thank you.
I wanted your affirmation on that because I think you’re probably smart about those things. Right, Scott? All right. The smart men in the back are saying, yeah, if you want to have a great marriage, don’t count on the fact that you fell in love with somebody.
Oh, my gosh. Any 16 year old can fall in love. How hard is that? I fell in love seven times every day in high school. Every cute girl that walked by, oh, I love her. Oh, I love her. That’s not hard. That’s hormones.
You want to have a good marriage, be intentional about learning what it means to love the person you married, and be intentional about making them feel loved every day of their life. That’s how you have a good marriage. Intentionality. Discipline is the fruit of passion.
We have passion for Jesus. And so it’s not just this legalism. It’s not that, oh, I got to read my Bible and I got to say my prayers. It’s that I get to. God wrote a book. Why wouldn’t I want to study that book?
God meets me when I say, Holy Spirit, come, Jesus, be in my room as I pray to you. Our Father, who art in heaven, he says, yeah, I’m in heaven, but I’m in your room right now, Kev. Hallowed be thy name.
Why wouldn’t we want to do that? Enjoy your relationship with God. Don’t treat it like some kind of drudgery, like homework. It is a joy to walk with the living God, and that creates in us a long obedience in the same direction.
Now, here’s what happens, dear ones. Here’s why these three legs of the stool are so important. Anybody who’s done carpentry work, Troy, you can help me here. But three legs work, right? Three legs will balance, all right. Four legs, you could be cattywampus.
Two legs, it’ll just fall. But three legs, all three legs will hit the ground. It might be, you know, one leg shorter, it might be sideways, but three legs will always balance. Well, if you don’t have these three legs, you get an unbalanced Christian life. Let’s say you really focus on power, but you don’t have love or discipline.
That leads to triumphalism and hype. And I do not like hype. And I’ve run into hype in my life. I’ve run into hype in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles, like, oh, go to this conference and it’ll be the greatest thing that ever happened to you. It wasn’t, it was good. It was fine.
We worshiped Jesus and God’s, but. But the hype, dear ones, God doesn’t need hype. Just tell the truth. I love the Vineyard movement because I love John Wimber because he operated on the power of the Spirit without the hype.
He used to operate what I used to call California mellow heel. Alright? You know, I watch Pentecostal preachers on TBN. I already told you, I made fun of them. And the thing that bothered me was all the God and Holy Spirit and all the, you know, swoopy hair and the gold rings and all that stuff.
I am more, I am more compassionate with that now because I, I understand some of the historical roots and so I do not judge that like I used to, but I used to judge it pretty harshly.
Then John Wimber came along, and he was from Southern California. He wore Hawaiian shirts and flip flops, and he’d pray for people like this: Holy Spirit, come. Yeah, heal that. Oh, look at that. God’s healing it right now. How about that, people?
It’s like, wow, you can do it without the hype. You don’t have to yell like God’s deaf. Demons, you don’t have to yell at demons. Come out in the Name of Jesus. You can just say in the Name of Jesus, come out. Skedaddle. I don’t know if they know what skedaddle means.
It may be tongues for get out. I don’t know. Thank you, Jamie. In the Name of Jesus, skedaddle. All right. All power without love and a sound mind hype. All love without the power of God and the sound mind leads to codependent humanism. It leads to, we just want to be nice to everybody. And this is the mistake of the liberal church. Alright?
What do you mean homosexuality is wrong? Well, it’s wrong because God designed us for male and female, and it hurts people when they deviate from God’s plan. And so love says, this is brokenness and you can be healed. Enabling says, if it makes you feel good, do it. And it’s gotten to levels of greater ridiculousness.
You know, if it makes you feel good to be a boy, and you’re a girl. You don’t have to be a girl. Yeah, you do. That’s how God made you. You don’t have to be a boy. Yeah, you do. That’s how God made you. It’s denying the truth, and it’s not love.
Whenever you invite people to step out of reality, to embrace fantasy, brokenness, and sin, you’re not helping them. And here’s the thing that amazed me about the humanist lovers. When you didn’t agree with their definition of love, tolerance, inclusivity, and diversity, they became the meanest snakes you ever ran into. Oh, my gosh, were they rotten. It’s like, wow.
You know, I saw some person said, I’m gonna stay woke because I want to love people different than me. And I just wanted to put on there. Not because I’m a big Trump fan, but just as a test. I say, do you love Donald Trump because he’s different than you? You know, or do you love Trump voters? Just current issue.
Listen, Mick, I can honestly say with all my heart, I love Yankees fans. I do. And I love Red Sox fans. Kathleen. Yeah, I do. And the thing that strikes me even more important than I love you is that you and Mick seem to love each other. A Red Sack fan and a Yankee fan. Yeah, that doesn’t happen.
I went to Fenway Park, and one of the people at Fenway Park, we were touring the parks, and he says, oh, you’re gonna go to Yankee Stadium? And I said, yeah, I’m gonna go to Yankee Stadium.
I said, I’m not a Yankee fan. I don’t like the Yankees. It’s good. You can have Thanksgiving dinner at my house anytime. And then he said, listen, do me a favor. If you go to Yankee Stadium, see if you can get down next to the field. I said, why? He says, spit on it.
Okay, but I love Yankee sense. All right? I do. All right? I’m a sports fan. I love the teams I hate. I love the fans of the teams I hate. All right, an aside. What if you have. What if you have self control? What if you have discipline but no power and no love? Legalism. Legalism. Thundering orthodoxy. Believe this, do this, follow this, and you’re a Pharisee.
Listen, reading the Bible is great, but if reading the Bible does not lead you into an encounter with God, it makes you a Pharisee because it leads you to all discipline without the power of God and the love of God.
Now, what if you just have two of the three? Well, if you have love and discipline, thinking but no power, you have spiritual boredom. That was me as my young life years. We believed the Bible, we believed the word, we studied, and we loved, we loved each other.
We loved those kids that we’d go visit on campus. But when somebody got sick, we just started praying powerless prayers like this. Well, God, if it just is your will. We don’t know if it is your will, but if it’s just your will, maybe just you could heal them.
Those are not faith filled prayers, people. Those are not faith filled prayers. Now I will say, God is so good, if somebody has faith he will even answer that prayer.
I had a woman one time. She’s sitting in the back of the church, and the Lord speaks to her and says, go up and have Kevin pray for you, and I’ll heal you.
She has this argument with God. She says, I’m not going to go up and have Kevin pray for me. And the Lord says, no, go up and have Kevin pray for you, and I’ll heal you. She goes, no, I’m not going to go up and have Kevin pray for me.
Lord says a third time, will you just go up and have Kevin pray for you? I’ll heal you. And she said, Lord, I’m not going to pray for my pastor to heal me of menstrual cramps. Not going to do it.
And then she said this. She gave God a deal. She said, unless Kevin calls me out personally, I’m not going up. Now, she was the wife of one of the members of our leadership team. And usually, our leadership team would join me at the end of the service to pray with me.
None of them were there, but she was there. And. And the minute she said that prayer, me not knowing she had said that prayer, I said, margie, why don’t you come on up here and pray with me? And so she got, you know, the big eyes and kind of walked up.
And so we’re standing up there waiting for somebody to come to pray with and nobody’s coming. And all of a sudden I hear this, it’s me. I go, what’s you? It’s me. you’re supposed to pray for me. And I go, okay, what’s going on?
She goes, I have menstrual cramps. And God said that if I got prayer from you, I’d heal him, okay? I did not pray for. I prayed with no faith.
I had three sisters growing up, a wife, two daughters. When I hear the word menstrual cramps, I think sports bar, go watch the game somewhere else, you know, brave man that I am. I have menstrual cramps. I have a job to do. That was always a good way for my wife to get the lawn mowed. I have menstrual cramps. So I’ll go mow the lawn.
Take me six hours. All right. But I prayed. And this time I actually prayed that prayer. I started to pray with faith, Lord, in the Name of Jesus, take away these menstrual cramps. And then I caved because I just didn’t believe it. I just said, but if not, Lord, give her the grace to endure. Weakest prayer ever prayed. I’ll never pray that way again. Alright? But I did. But here’s the thing. She had faith, right? Because she had had the encounter with God.
And God just said, if you go up there, and so we get done, and I turn to see who else is coming up for prayer. And she said, it worked. And here was my level of unbelief. I turned to her and I said, what worked? But the menstrual cramps went away.
And then I got full of myself. Ooh, menstrual cramp anointing. I can make a lot of money from a bunch of fathers. Hey, bring your daughter here. All right? God, I don’t know. What was that even about? Power, love, sound mind. Oh, spiritual boredom.
Without power, there’s spiritual boredom. Where is your God? We worship the great I was. Look at all the wonderful things he did in the Bible. And we worship the great I will be. Look at all the wonderful things he’s going to do for us when we die. But he’s the great I am. He’s the great I am. And so he’s here now. There was a woman in our church. She was the first woman ever to be slain in the Spirit or fall out in the Spirit. And again, least likely woman to do this.
She was a lifelong Presbyterian. She was always put together. Her hair was always perfect. Her clothes were perfect, her jewelry was perfect. She was a lot of fun. She’s a terrific woman.
But she was just put together and she would, you know, if it hadn’t happened to her first, when it started to happen to other people, she might have been one of the people to leave. Because it’s like, oh, that’s just crazy. But it happened to her first, and I prayed for her.
Holy Spirit, come in the Name of Jesus. She hit the ground, and she started convulsing. Tiny little woman, she started convulsing. One of her best friends came up and stood next to me, goes, what is going on? And I said, I don’t know.
Then I looked at her friend and I said, but the fact that it’s happening to Susan is. It sure has entertainment value. She goes, yeah, it does. No boredom. Spiritual boredom. All right. Love and discipline thinking, oh, my slides got goofy. Power and discipline thinking, without love equals performance orientation. All right?
If we don’t have love, then we grade ourselves on, you know, how many people did you heal? How many demons did you cast out? How many Bible verses did you memorize? And our Christianity becomes all about performance orientation. Our relationship with God starts to become works oriented.
We bring before God our victories. Say, look what I did, God. This is what the Corinthian Church was dealing with. That’s why right in the middle of Paul’s talk about spiritual gifts, he inserts the great chapter on love.
He says, all your tongues and all your prophecies, you’re using them for your own spiritual pride. Without love, they’re a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.
You know what? It’s Jesus who does it all. We just get to be a conduit. We just get to be a conduit. He just works through us.
And the final is power and love. But no disciplined thinking. You have disorder and stagnancy. Everybody’s excited. Everybody’s loving on each other, but nobody knows where to go next. We have no discipline. We have no direction.
And so one leg, two legs isn’t good enough. Three legs. you’ve not received a spirit of timidity, but a power, love, and a sound mind is a person and a church that cannot be stopped.
And that’s the theme verse. The firehouse church. That’s who we are. Power, love, and a sound mind. We want it all. Not either or. We’re not going to sacrifice anything. We’re not going to sacrifice power. We’re not going to sacrifice love. We’re not going to sacrifice discipleship. We want it all. In the Name of Jesus, or I want it all.
I don’t know about you guys, but I want it all. All right. You want it all. I have no doubt. I have no doubt, Marcia. I have no doubt that any of you. you’re all that way. you’re all that way. you’re just. You guys are just so good, you know? I know you’re rotten sinner, saved by grace, but I mean, I still think you’re just so good.
All right, dear ones. I just want to say, you know, every week we have communion. I decided I’m going to do this on the first Sunday in January, when we get done with going through the Bible in the year. We only got one more year, by the way.
Next Sunday night, I am going to go through the Book of Revelation in its entirety. I’m going to explain to you every mystery, and I’m going to give you the complete, inerrant understanding of the Book of Revelation. Yeah, you’ll know what it’s all about.
Yeah, that ain’t going to happen, Kathleen. All right. We might be in Revelation next Sunday, but you’re not getting that. All right, you’re going to get. I think this is what that means. All right, so, dear ones, but after that, I think the first Sunday in January, I think I’m going to just. I want to, because I just.
Every week we have communion, it’s like, what are we doing? And I don’t know if you know this, but historically, there’s kind of four views of communion.
And I’m just going to share with you what those four views are. I’m not going to tell you what your view should be. I’m going to tell you what my view is, which is, in a way, telling you what your view should be. But you can. You can do what you want, you know? I do. Ultimately, I land with CS Lewis. I land with CS Lewis here, and I land with CS Lewis, the same idea when it comes to eschatology. I have my views on eschatology.
They’re not the popular ones, but I have them and my views on Communion. But C.S. Lewis said, you know, ultimately the command was take and eat, not take and understand.
But sometimes I think understanding helps us, and it may help us with the visions in the church when we understand where our brothers and sisters may be coming from and their views.
And so I’ll just share with you four different views of communion, and the one that just seems to me to make the most scriptural and rational sense to me and what I kind of talk about every time we have communion.
And so that’ll be the first Sunday of the year, I think, next week. The full book of Revelation explained, all right.
On the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it. He gave it to his disciples and said, this is my body, which is given for you.
In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, gave thanks to his Father in heaven. He said, this is my blood, which is shed for you and for many. He said, do this as often as you gather together, and don’t forget. Don’t forget what I’m doing for you, and be fed. It’s bread. It’s fruit of the vine.
Be fed tonight on the word that was preached, on the fellowship that we had, on the worship and praise we gave to God. And in the same way, come to his table and ask that Jesus would nourish you spiritually with this food, and he would use this meal to make you more like him. Tonight, in Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.
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