SPEAKER_00: Hey, I'm Steve Holt, the senior pastor of the Road at Chapel Hills.
SPEAKER_00: This is the Road Podcast.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: My heart is to empower you to change the world.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this message impacts you.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so turning your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 3, verse 1 of Ephesians 3.
SPEAKER_00: For this reason, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for you Gentiles.
SPEAKER_00: You know what's interesting about Paul is that Paul was a rising star in Judaism.
SPEAKER_00: He was a part of the Sanhedrin.
SPEAKER_00: He was a leader of leaders.
SPEAKER_00: He was a Pharisee of Pharisees.
SPEAKER_00: He hated Gentiles.
SPEAKER_00: He couldn't stand them.
SPEAKER_00: They were the flesh-eating, pig-eating, pork-eating Gentiles that he was trying to persecute.
SPEAKER_00: And on one of his assignments from the Sanhedrin, God just nails him.
SPEAKER_00: And he gets saved.
SPEAKER_00: He goes blind.
SPEAKER_00: And then three days later, some guy that he's never met before.
SPEAKER_00: Ananias comes, lays hands on him, scales fall off his eyes.
SPEAKER_00: He's born again.
SPEAKER_00: And then God calls him in a direct, visionary way, go to the Gentiles, who he hated.
SPEAKER_00: You guys know that God is really weird sometimes in his callings.
SPEAKER_00: So when I was in high school, my worst class was Spanish.
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm just going to tell you, there's not a language for an American to learn that's any easier than Spanish.
SPEAKER_00: Now, part of it was I had a gymnastics coach who was my teacher, and he knew a lot more about gymnastics than about Spanish.
SPEAKER_00: So I wouldn't say that he set the place on fire with his Spanish teaching.
SPEAKER_00: But I always got good grades because I was his star athlete.
SPEAKER_00: But, but I mean my point is that I wasn't good in linguistics.
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't good in languages.
SPEAKER_00: I never tried, and it would, I just figure it's too hard.
SPEAKER_00: And then God calls me to Japan.
SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding me?
SPEAKER_00: That's like the worst language for Americans to learn.
SPEAKER_00: Everything's opposite grammatically, it's just a messed up language, man.
SPEAKER_00: And um and I soon learned, you know, language is a reflection of culture.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what you learn about Japanese when you study Japanese and you're around Japanese, you live in Japan, is that they're always tug about being tribal.
SPEAKER_00: So what they do is they're very tribal, they're very cultural, group-oriented in everything they do.
SPEAKER_00: So what they do is they put their verbs, and they they put their verbs at the beginning, but they put their nouns at the end.
SPEAKER_00: You know why?
SPEAKER_00: Because they're looking for the response and reaction, and they can change the sentence at the last minute.
SPEAKER_00: I hate that.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we always start off, that's American, you know, we're English.
SPEAKER_00: We start with the noun, man.
SPEAKER_00: We start with the subject right there.
SPEAKER_00: I, you know, boom, you know, direct object.
SPEAKER_00: With they do it just the opposite.
SPEAKER_00: But I be I preached in Japanese.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's like supernatural, man.
SPEAKER_00: There's no way that's natural.
SPEAKER_00: So God may call you to do stuff you never thought you could do.
SPEAKER_00: My wife doing school in a box is like so out of her normal orbit, but she she formed this team, and they've got these killer projects, these killer trainings that you go through as you go through the Bible with school in a box.
SPEAKER_00: It's really, really good.
SPEAKER_00: And so, what God does sometimes in our lives to give, you guys have heard me say this before, I'll mention it again, paradigm shift.
SPEAKER_00: If you're taking notes, write down paradigm shift.
SPEAKER_00: Paul had a massive paradigm shift.
SPEAKER_00: That means his whole worldview shifted in about three days from hating Gentiles to now being called the Gentiles, his understanding of the law and the idea of the legalism of Judaism into an understanding of grace that was supernatural.
SPEAKER_00: God can do that in your life.
SPEAKER_00: God can sometimes come and reorient you, and you're at the right church, by the way, because we're open to the power of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: We're open to the present Holy Spirit, and God, like I had a couple come up after the first service and say they come out of the United Church of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: They come all the way from Parker down here.
SPEAKER_00: And the wife just comes up to me and she just effuses praise for what we're doing medically and physically to help so many people.
SPEAKER_00: She's following our protocol and getting her parents better.
SPEAKER_00: The husband comes up and he goes, I've I've gotten born again here.
SPEAKER_00: And my kids, you know?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Yes, awesome.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it's all about.
SPEAKER_00: That's a paradigm shift, men and women.
SPEAKER_00: When God comes and you thought church was this, and then you come and church is that.
SPEAKER_00: It's not an institution.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it is an institution, but it's not an institution.
SPEAKER_00: It's an organism more than it's an organization.
SPEAKER_00: So what that means is that God moves as the CEO of the church.
SPEAKER_00: He's the senior pastor.
SPEAKER_00: He's the capital S, capital P senior pastor.
SPEAKER_00: So he comes and invades Paul's life, and now Paul's in prison.
SPEAKER_00: How about that?
SPEAKER_00: Eat those apples.
SPEAKER_00: So he's the star, rising star in Judaism.
SPEAKER_00: Now he's in prison writing the Ephesians, and I can guarantee you he's not in prison.
SPEAKER_00: He's in prison physically, but he is not in prison spiritually.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you know that you can be put in prison physically, but it has nothing to do with your heart?
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have been through divorces, some of you have been through betrayal, some of you have been through drug addiction, you've been through the gamut, and in and if we were to look at you, we go, man, that was a time where you were kind of in prison.
SPEAKER_00: But what God was doing during that time is he was reorienting your heart.
SPEAKER_00: He was changing your heart.
SPEAKER_00: God does his best work when you're in prison.
SPEAKER_00: Dietrich Bonhoeper wrote his best works when he was in prison.
SPEAKER_00: Solsenitsyn in the Russian gulag wrote his best works because of what God did in prison in a communist concentration camp.
SPEAKER_00: John Bunyan came up with the whole vision and idea of the Pilgrim's Progress, probably one of the greatest books written in Western Christianity while in prison.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us may go to prison here in America because of what's happening in Washington.
SPEAKER_00: But you can be a prisoner physically, but not a prisoner spiritually.
SPEAKER_00: You know who the prisoners were?
SPEAKER_00: All the guards that had to watch over Paul.
SPEAKER_00: They were the prisoners because he preached to them all the time.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 2, if indeed you heard of the dispensation, underlying dispensation, write over on the side with your pen, write stewardship.
SPEAKER_00: That's what that word can mean, stewardship.
SPEAKER_00: If indeed you have heard of the stewardship of the grace of God which is given to me for you, that by revelation he made known to me the mystery, as I have briefly written already, by which when you read you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets.
SPEAKER_00: Mystery.
SPEAKER_00: Write down mystery.
SPEAKER_00: The mystery of the gospel is what Paul is talking about, and he says he had a revelation.
SPEAKER_00: Now we don't know what that revelation was.
SPEAKER_00: That's the same Greek word for the book of Revelation, which means the unveiling.
SPEAKER_00: So there was some kind of a paradigm shift through a revelation of God the Father to Paul.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know if it was a vision, a dream.
SPEAKER_00: He was maybe reading in the Torah, and God spoke to him, but he began to understand that there was this mystery of the past that men and women had not understood about the things of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And mystery is really hard for Western Christianity.
SPEAKER_00: Western Christianity struggles with mystery.
SPEAKER_00: We like everything cut and dried.
SPEAKER_00: The church, the part of the body of the Christ that understands mystery the best and has always been the most open is Eastern Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_00: And when I was uh when I was in seminary, I took Greek, loved Greek.
SPEAKER_00: Father Sam was my professor at Fuller.
SPEAKER_00: Now check this out.
SPEAKER_00: Father Sam had been a vineyard pastor who became a Greek Orthodox priest.
SPEAKER_00: That's weird, folks.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: And I would go into his office sometimes with my Greek questions and stuff, and I'd be in there and there'd be icons everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: It's icons from so I loved it.
SPEAKER_00: I always felt like the presence of God was there.
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, whoa, what are you for icons?
SPEAKER_00: I'm not, don't make any states.
SPEAKER_00: That's the reason you struggle with mystery.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm in there and I'm like, whoa.
SPEAKER_00: And there, you know, it's like icons of Mary and Jesus and angels and stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just telling you, man, it was like freaky cool.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: All right, listen.
SPEAKER_00: Here's why we struggle in Western Christianity with mystery, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00: I want to give you three thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_00: Number one, Western Christianity is largely based in a Western worldview.
SPEAKER_00: We have a Western worldview, which is rationalistic, materialistic, and linear.
SPEAKER_00: Let me say it again, rationalistic, materialistic, and linear.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's really good for science.
SPEAKER_00: That's really good for geography.
SPEAKER_00: That's really good for mathematics.
SPEAKER_00: But in the spiritual realm, it doesn't always work.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you know that if you just think about you getting saved, can you explain that rationalistically, materialistically, or linearly?
SPEAKER_00: No, you can't.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is a mystery.
SPEAKER_00: There's aspects we don't understand.
SPEAKER_00: Jot this word down, really key word, transrational.
SPEAKER_00: Christianity is always transrational.
SPEAKER_00: God sometimes has to bypass your mind to get to your heart.
SPEAKER_00: I've had so many, especially men, through the years that come forward, they're up here, and they are like this.
SPEAKER_00: And if you ask them, and they tell you, my wife made me come up here.
SPEAKER_00: And they're up here.
SPEAKER_00: And I like to bypass the mind and get to the heart and ask, tell me about your heart.
SPEAKER_00: What's happening in your heart right now?
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to convince anybody of Christianity.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to use a rational argument, which there's a place for that.
SPEAKER_00: There sure certainly is.
SPEAKER_00: But most of the time, God works in the heart before he works in the mind.
SPEAKER_00: And then as God begins to flood that man's heart with belief, folks, it's transrational.
SPEAKER_00: It's the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Today is Pentecost Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: If you come out of the Roman Catholic Church or the Methodist Church or the Lutheran mainline churches, they would be talking about Pentecost today.
SPEAKER_00: This is Pentecost Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit coming in Acts chapter 2 is transrational.
SPEAKER_00: Just a group of cowardly, frightened, 120 disciples.
SPEAKER_00: Holy Spirit falls on them.
SPEAKER_00: Wind blows through, tongues of fire, like tongues of fire, they start to speak in tongues.
SPEAKER_00: That's not materialistic, linear, or rational.
SPEAKER_00: So what happens for us as Western Christians is we can't be open to the miraculous.
SPEAKER_00: You go into South America, you go into Africa, you go into other parts of the world where I've been, and they not only believe in the supernatural, they give all the credit to demons.
SPEAKER_00: Then they get saved, and it's almost like this: like, I'm not going to believe in your religion unless you can get all my demons out.
SPEAKER_00: So if we think a rational, materialistic, linear approach only to the gospel is going to work, they're out of here.
SPEAKER_00: But when they see a Holy Spirit come and healings come and people are set free, they go, I believe.
SPEAKER_00: And they get it.
SPEAKER_00: So secondly, second thing that I think is a problem for us in Western Christianity is we like labels so much.
SPEAKER_00: We need labels because labels give definition.
SPEAKER_00: We like to organize, we like to categorize churches, people, and denominations, right?
SPEAKER_00: I do it too.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we all do it.
SPEAKER_00: And so they're like that.
SPEAKER_00: They're holy rollers.
SPEAKER_00: How many have ever been to a church where people roll around on the floor?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'd say there's 15 hands up out of five or six hundred people.
SPEAKER_00: But you hear holy rollers.
SPEAKER_00: Where are they?
SPEAKER_00: You know?
SPEAKER_00: It's a come on.
SPEAKER_00: So the so it's a label.
SPEAKER_00: And that means you don't want to go to one of those kind of churches, right?
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: So we label things.
SPEAKER_00: And so what that does, and we do that with God too, is we box him in.
SPEAKER_00: So we box, this is what God can do, this is what he can't do.
SPEAKER_00: Don't talk about this, just talk about my little my little paradigm of what God can do.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, Western Christianity's hermeneutic.
SPEAKER_00: Raise your hand if you know what hermeneutic means.
SPEAKER_00: Whoa, a lot more smart people than the first service.
SPEAKER_00: Only one hand went up in the first service.
SPEAKER_00: Hermeneutic means interpretation.
SPEAKER_00: It means to interpret.
SPEAKER_00: So Western Christianity is hermeneutic of experience versus Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Experience versus Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I mean.
SPEAKER_00: It's actually another way to say it is lack of experience versus Bible.
SPEAKER_00: So if I were to say, I don't believe God in that, we I hear this all the time, I don't believe in healing.
SPEAKER_00: God doesn't heal today.
SPEAKER_00: But then when they get healed, they believe.
SPEAKER_00: But nothing changed except they got healed.
SPEAKER_00: So what happens is we have a hermeneutic in which we interpret life by either our experience or, listen, lack of experience.
SPEAKER_00: So someone says, I don't believe in miracles until they have a miracle, and then suddenly they believe.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: So, so Paul is saying that he was given special wisdom from the Father about the mystery of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: I want to keep knowing Christ in a deeper way even as I grow older.
SPEAKER_00: I want to understand grace in a deeper way.
SPEAKER_00: I want to understand love in a deeper way.
SPEAKER_00: I want to love, I want to understand forgiveness in a deeper way.
SPEAKER_00: I want to understand repentance in a deeper way.
SPEAKER_00: It's an ocean of revelation and knowledge that's available to us.
SPEAKER_00: That's the mystery of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't figured it out in either of you.
SPEAKER_00: But so many think they have.
SPEAKER_00: They've got it all figured out.
SPEAKER_00: And they have websites, they got their little websites where all they do is get on that website and then show, and then show videos of other preachers preaching and then just critique them.
SPEAKER_00: Like they're the Holy Spirit or something.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about cults, I'm talking about other Christian believers.
SPEAKER_00: And I remember because I was working for a guy named John Wember, who's probably one of the leading sort of charismatic pastors in the 80s and 90s.
SPEAKER_00: I'm his assistant.
SPEAKER_00: And Hank Hanagraph, the Bible answer man, is just hammering the vineyard, hammering John Wimber at meetings that I was at.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, that did not happen.
SPEAKER_00: And I like Hank Hanagraph.
SPEAKER_00: I've never met him.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he seems like a nice guy.
SPEAKER_00: But he built his reputation on going after other believers in the body of Christ because they didn't do things exactly the way he did.
SPEAKER_00: Be careful of that, you guys.
SPEAKER_00: Walter Martin, Kingdom of the Cause, he never did that.
SPEAKER_00: But I don't even know if the Bible answer man's around anymore.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot to be learned from.
SPEAKER_00: He's got some great stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just talking about some of the other parts.
SPEAKER_00: My point is this we need unity right now.
SPEAKER_00: We need to be for each other.
SPEAKER_00: I'm for Hank Hanagraph as long as he's for me, okay?
SPEAKER_00: You know?
SPEAKER_00: And the reality is, is within the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church and the Protestant Church and the Evangelical Church, there's there's there's key things we work together on it, but it's a mystery.
SPEAKER_00: I don't understand it all.
SPEAKER_00: So now he talks about what these three mysteries are in our chapter.
SPEAKER_00: He says this.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 6 that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of his promise in Christ through the gospel, of which I became a minister according to the gift of the grace of God given to me by the effective working of his power.
SPEAKER_00: First thing is the mystery of Gentiles getting saved.
SPEAKER_00: We're almost everybody here is a Gentile.
SPEAKER_00: We are the church in Colorado Springs.
SPEAKER_00: You go to South America, you go to Russia, you go to Southeast Asia, all Gentiles that have gotten saved because Paul got a handle on this mystery of reaching the Gentiles.
SPEAKER_00: But men and women, when you look at the trajectory of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, it seems that this is all about the Jews.
SPEAKER_00: But he was given revelation to understand that God was actually using the Jews foundationally for the whole world to hear the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: So that's that reality he still does today.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, God's doing stuff today that we don't completely understand.
SPEAKER_00: Let's just take COVID.
SPEAKER_00: Could not God be using this in some supernatural, mighty, mysterious way to actually bring the real church to the top to learn how to fight.
SPEAKER_00: To learn how to war, to learn how to take active their Christianity while they're on the face of the earth, not just singing kumbaya, but actually going out and making a difference.
SPEAKER_00: I know that's what's happened here.
SPEAKER_00: With thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people coming through our doors.
SPEAKER_00: Health running through our church.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we hadn't had a COVID case in months.
SPEAKER_00: And then the vaccine came out.
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly everybody's getting it again because of shedding.
SPEAKER_00: It's coming off.
SPEAKER_00: Nothing against the vaccine except that I wouldn't get it.
SPEAKER_00: But you can do what you want.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to tell you what to do.
SPEAKER_00: And your Christianity is not based on whether you take the vaccine or not.
SPEAKER_00: Don't hear me say that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying there's now a variance of that COVID coming out through the vaccine.
SPEAKER_00: And there's another one coming.
SPEAKER_00: And it's going to be like what's happening in India right now.
SPEAKER_00: This church is going to be ready.
SPEAKER_00: Many of you in this room have got strong immune systems because you've now experienced it and you've been in it.
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to be one of the strong.
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you, man, God's going to use this church in a mighty way.
SPEAKER_00: The hospitals don't know what to do with it.
SPEAKER_00: They just said, go home.
SPEAKER_00: And they said, Great, call us.
SPEAKER_00: We'll take care of people.
SPEAKER_00: In about 48 hours, we get them better.
SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
SPEAKER_00: You guys, listen, listen.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, listen.
SPEAKER_00: God made your body most of the time to heal itself.
SPEAKER_00: If you're healthy.
SPEAKER_00: And the way you get healthy is you listen to us, because we'll make you healthy.
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna start, we're gonna start cutting back on the donuts out there.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna lie.
SPEAKER_00: Yay! Boo! Yay! Boo.
SPEAKER_00: I just want you to know my one time of the week when I'm set free on sugar is on Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: I'll miss that.
SPEAKER_00: My wife won't, but I will.
SPEAKER_00: No, we're gonna still have some.
SPEAKER_00: But my point is this that if you'll if you'll learn to eat healthy and follow God's regime of how to eat healthy, you're you'll rarely get sick.
SPEAKER_00: You'll rarely get sick.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't seen a doctor in 20 years.
SPEAKER_00: And it's and it's nothing, I don't have anything against doctors.
SPEAKER_00: I think doctors are cool, they're awesome.
SPEAKER_00: Come, we need doctors here.
SPEAKER_00: It's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00: But my point is that.
SPEAKER_00: I've been blessed with a good constitution and I try to take care of it, and so should you.
SPEAKER_00: And so it works.
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know what that all that had to do with the Gentiles, but there you go.
SPEAKER_00: Now, verse 8.
SPEAKER_00: This is really important.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 8.
SPEAKER_00: Really important.
SPEAKER_00: To me, who am less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery.
SPEAKER_00: Now stop right there.
SPEAKER_00: What's the fellowship of the mystery?
SPEAKER_00: Here's what the fellowship of the mystery is The Fellowship of the Mystery is when you truly believe that God is in control of what's happening in our life, even though others don't like what you believe.
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you an example.
SPEAKER_00: So, Genesis 1:1 says God created the heavens and the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Darwin's theory of evolution is falling apart.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody out there that's true science and they're really studying it realize there's no link between microevolution and macroevolution.
SPEAKER_00: If there was, there'd be somebody out there that's like because they're halfway between.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you got seven billion people that at least be one.
SPEAKER_00: At one who's kind of in between apism and humanism.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're kind of right there, and they're and they're really good at gymnastics because they can just fly across the bars and everything, whoa, with a banana in one hand.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: There ain't none.
SPEAKER_00: There never has been none.
SPEAKER_00: Darwin got it on the Galapagos Islands with microevolution.
SPEAKER_00: That's a great discovery.
SPEAKER_00: But then we extrapolate, these atheists and agnostics extrapolate then into macroevolution.
SPEAKER_00: And there ain't no whale people.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I go go fishing.
SPEAKER_00: I've never caught like this whale.
SPEAKER_00: I'm pulling him in, and he's got like a head on it, and it's like a human head or something.
SPEAKER_00: Or a hand that comes out of the fin.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's a human hand.
SPEAKER_00: So you're so you guys, you believe in a creator God who created the heavens and the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And that we actually believe this book, we believe this Bible, and in so doing, you're a part of the mystery, the fellowship of the mystery, and it we're gonna win.
SPEAKER_00: You see about the archway?
SPEAKER_00: Darwin's arch?
SPEAKER_00: Fell.
SPEAKER_00: It fell in two weeks ago.
SPEAKER_00: CNN reported it.
SPEAKER_00: That is prophetic.
SPEAKER_00: It's falling.
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna see.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, you guys, this is how smart I am.
SPEAKER_00: I got a really cool watch.
SPEAKER_00: I paid$22 at Target for this watch.
SPEAKER_00: A great watch.
SPEAKER_00: It's a marathoner's watch.
SPEAKER_00: It's got all these ways you can time and stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And every time I look at it, I think I should run a marathon.
SPEAKER_00: But if I were to take this watch and just take it apart, take all the components and scatter it in some woods.
SPEAKER_00: How many years would it take for all those components to come together and one day I'm walking in the woods and there's my watch all put back together?
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
SPEAKER_00: But if I were to say there was actually an intelligent person somewhere that made a Timex watch and put it together, would you believe me?
SPEAKER_00: See, we're fine with that.
SPEAKER_00: But if we somehow associate it with a creator God, we've got a problem with that.
SPEAKER_00: It's because it's demonic.
SPEAKER_00: And so, men and women, God's called us to be a part of the fellowship of the mystery.
SPEAKER_00: The fellowship of the mystery says we believe the body can heal itself most of the time.
SPEAKER_00: So if I pray for someone to be healed up here of diabetes, but then they won't change their diet, then they're gonna get diabetes again.
SPEAKER_00: But if we don't pray for someone for diabetes, but they change their diet, they can get healed.
SPEAKER_00: So the natural and the supernatural are always working together.
SPEAKER_00: That's the mystery, listen, the fellowship of the mystery.
SPEAKER_00: Guys, this is our team.
SPEAKER_00: We stick together.
SPEAKER_00: And as we believe that, we become blood-stained allies, and God makes us a powerful, powerful church.
SPEAKER_00: So God created all things through Jesus Christ, verse 9, verse 10, and this is the second mystery, to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places according to the eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Men and women, when we come together as a church, we are speaking life, we are speaking Jesus, we are speaking salvation, we are speaking healing, we are speaking freedom to principalities and powers over this city.
SPEAKER_00: That's why when a man or a woman gets saved, and then the kids get saved, the kingdom of God has come to that house and demons leave.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are demonized.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, you're still carrying the demons of the past, and you're going to get set free in the days ahead because you're fellowshipping with the church.
SPEAKER_00: By being in the church, God's setting you free.
SPEAKER_00: And when we preach the gospel, when we get up and we make that declaration, our road declaration, we don't even know the power of that into the heavenly realm.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why we have an open heaven.
SPEAKER_00: There's an open heaven over the road right now because we pray, we worship, we preach the gospel, and we just keep doing it day after day after day, and it's becoming like a, I like what Sean said last week, a shame-free zone.
SPEAKER_00: A shame-free zone.
SPEAKER_00: A bondage-free zone to begin to change us and transform us.
SPEAKER_00: That's what the church does.
SPEAKER_00: That's why they wanted to shut down the church last year.
SPEAKER_00: Because if we could shut down the church, there's nothing hindering demonic powers to flood our cities.
SPEAKER_00: That's the reason the riots happened.
SPEAKER_00: That's the reason all the stuff happened.
SPEAKER_00: Where was the church?
SPEAKER_00: And that's why God spoke to Sean to go into those troubled areas and go in there, and thousands would come out, and they would see crime abate.
SPEAKER_00: They would see God move in a mighty way.
SPEAKER_00: And church, that's why we're here.
SPEAKER_00: We're to be a revolutionary people, a counter-cultural people.
SPEAKER_00: Who fear only God.
SPEAKER_00: We don't fear man.
SPEAKER_00: And we do it together.
SPEAKER_00: You're not on your own.
SPEAKER_00: Don't ever think that.
SPEAKER_00: You're always on a team.
SPEAKER_00: You're on the team.
SPEAKER_00: You get the t-shirt.
SPEAKER_00: Manifold wisdom of God in the heavenly places.
SPEAKER_00: And then lastly, verse 12, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in him.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I ask you, do not lose heart in my tribulation for you, which is your glory.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly and lastly, there's the mystery of prayer.
SPEAKER_00: There's the mystery of the power of prayer.
SPEAKER_00: There's this mystery that we can go in boldness and access with confidence Jesus and His Spirit in our life.
SPEAKER_00: You guys, when we pray, things happen.
SPEAKER_00: When we have noonday prayer, every noonday, if you haven't been, you ought to come.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, man, it's like we're fired up and sometimes we're not.
SPEAKER_00: But when we come and we pray, something's happening.
SPEAKER_00: We may not see it yet, but we see it at different times.
SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing things happen in our city when we pray.
SPEAKER_00: I will build my church, Jesus said.
SPEAKER_00: And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
SPEAKER_00: I give you the keys of the kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: You see, what he's saying is that the church is not just a church that prays, it is a praying church.
SPEAKER_00: And when we come together and we start to ask God for things, we begin to call out to God to make a difference in our society and culture, that's the keys of the kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: And most churches don't know how much power we really have.
SPEAKER_00: You guys have so much power.
SPEAKER_00: And when you come together and you believed God together, you can move mountains.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus said.
SPEAKER_00: You see, for me and for Liz, Liz and I, we believe prayer is asking and receiving.
SPEAKER_00: Asking and receiving.
SPEAKER_00: That's the essence of prayer.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus said.
SPEAKER_00: Asking and receiving.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's devotional prayer, there's uh intimacy in prayer in which we're worshiping God, I call that worship.
SPEAKER_00: But when I talk about prayer, I mean you come in and it is a war room.
SPEAKER_00: And you battle against principalities and power and you ask God to change things.
SPEAKER_00: If you've got a son or a daughter on drugs and you're a Jesus follower, you get on your knees and you battle for that son and daughter.
SPEAKER_00: You do not expect the church to do it for you.
SPEAKER_00: You don't expect that somehow they're gonna read their Bible or meet somebody.
SPEAKER_00: You get on your face and you pray until they're set free.
SPEAKER_00: If you're without a job right now and you need a job, then get on your face and ask God for a job because he says, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as in.
SPEAKER_00: Give us this day our daily breath.
SPEAKER_00: And you can't have bread without money, and you can have money without a job.
SPEAKER_00: So thinking it's just gonna fall down in your lap is ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00: Ask for it.
SPEAKER_00: He loves you.
SPEAKER_00: He's just waiting for you to ask so that he can begin to move in your life.
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't have the faith for it, then gather others who do.
SPEAKER_00: And you guys pray for it.
SPEAKER_00: You're carrying cancer, ask God for healing.
SPEAKER_00: Cry out to God.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he's gonna heal.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not God, but I know this that we get a lot more by asking than not asking.
SPEAKER_00: So my kids were in all these situations, you know, as they're growing up and stuff, and they'll say something about something, and I go, well, go ask them.
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I can't do that.
SPEAKER_00: Why can't you?
SPEAKER_00: Well, they might say no.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, duh.
SPEAKER_00: But they might say, Yes.
SPEAKER_00: So ask.
SPEAKER_00: So you guys cry out to God.
SPEAKER_00: What do you need?
SPEAKER_00: Put it in your journal, write it down, make a list, and start getting together with your spouse or some friends, and you guys start asking God if you know it's God's will.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're praying, Lord, I just pray that I could divorce my wife.
SPEAKER_00: Got a problem there.
SPEAKER_00: It's gotta line up with Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: But there's a whole lot of us that live in poverty, and I'm not saying that just materially, I'm just saying you live with a poverty mentality because Christianity is kind of a religious thing you do.
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm saying it's a revolutionary thing you are.
SPEAKER_00: That's who you are.
SPEAKER_00: And so cry out to God.
SPEAKER_00: What are your needs?
SPEAKER_00: He promises to meet our needs.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that exciting?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks for listening to the Road Podcast.
SPEAKER_00: It's been my joy to be a part of your life today.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, that's part of what we do here at The Road, and this is what I do in having this Road Podcast, is to empower people to change their world.
SPEAKER_00: My passion and desire is that you would take God's word through the power of the Holy Spirit and make that relevant for your life.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the reality is that God has placed your life here on this earth to make a difference.
SPEAKER_00: And if you'd like more information about how to grow in Christ, if you need prayer, if you want more equipping in different areas of your life, go to the road.org.
SPEAKER_00: God bless you.