Speaking for God

SERMON: 2013-04-28--ac1399--speaking-for-god SOURCE DURATION: 00:49:55.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The sermon begins with an introductory review [0] and continues through theological exposition and application up to segment [477]. The subsequent segments are authoritative acoustic music intervals. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:47:02.520-00:49:51.660 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, just a quick review. We've been looking at recent months in God's stated desire to dwell among his people. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says in 2 Corinthians 6 verse 16, "We are the temple of the living God, as God has said, 'I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.'" And right into the Ephesians in chapter 2 verse 22, "In him that is in Christ, you too," that is the Gentiles, "are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit." And we've been seeing together in times gone by that just as in the Old Testament God manifest his presence to Israel by dwelling among them first in the tabernacle and then dwelling among them in the temple, so in the New Testament he dwells in the church, he dwells in individual believers not only, but he dwells among us corporately. We are the temple of the living God. And the genius of the church is that when we gather collectively like this, it's not just the sum total of us getting together, it is Jesus taking up his residence in our midst. Here is a verse that you've often heard me quote of late, the words of Jesus, Matthew 18 verse 20, "Where two or three, let alone many more, gather together in my name, there am I with them." And one of the questions that we've been considering together in recent weeks is what does this look like? What happens when God shows up among his people? Well, if you think back to Palm Sunday, we talked about that a little bit and we saw that when Jesus comes to the temple on that Sunday prior to his crucifixion and his resurrection, there are four things that he does when he visits the temple. Let me very quickly review those with you. First of all, he cleaned house. The money changers turned their tables over and he said, "My father's house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you've made it a den of robbers." Then secondly, the Bible says he healed and restored the sick. They came to him in the temple and he healed them all because you see when God is present, there is a healing virtue that flows forth from his presence. So then thirdly, he exposed the religious hypocrisy of the religious establishment. They were so caught up in proper decorum and proper rules and they were so in charge of how things ought to happen in the temple that when Jesus came along, he broke all their stereotypical images and he exposed their hypocrisy elsewhere in scripture. He says, "You're like whitewashed tombs. Outwardly you look beautifully white, but inwardly you're full of dead men's bones." Then fourthly, he came looking for fruit and when he couldn't find it, he cursed the fig tree symbolic of the judgment that would come upon Israel for breaking covenant, a judgment that was powerfully fulfilled in AD 70 when the Roman army invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the city, destroyed the temple and sold off hundreds of thousands of Israelites into slavery. That is what happened when Jesus showed up in the temple. Now this morning, picking up from there, I want to talk with you about a fifth thing that happens when Jesus comes to dwell among his people and that is the fact that he provides spiritual gifts to his people. And in our context this morning and in the context of this passage, particularly he provides the spiritual gift of leadership. Listen to how Paul puts it in Ephesians chapter four, the verses 11 and 12. He says, "Concerning the Lord Jesus, his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ." And if you read that verse in its context, you will see that it refers to Jesus ascending into heaven and the picture is that of a triumphal king coming into his city with all the captives in his train and then when he comes into the city to take it over, he gives gifts to those who have been with him in the battle and he assigns different positions to different followers. One of those positions is the position of apostle and without spending a lot of time on that, biblically an apostle like the apostle Paul has been commissioned by God to go out there, take the gospel to new areas and claim new areas for Christ. It involves a significant deal of authority and it involves significant responsibility of oversight over the churches that he plants. For the moment we'll skip the prophet, an evangelist as you know is one who proclaims the message of Christ and in the context of our own culture, one of the best known evangelists of course is Billy Graham who as I mentioned earlier, I think this year turns 94 or 95, has been in health for a long, long time, is still busy writing books. In fact back in September when Michelle and I had opportunity to drive to visit Jonathan and Tanya in Texas, we on the way back stopped at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. And one of the tour guides who showed us around the house that he was raised in, which has been rebuilt on the site there, was his niece and she didn't tell us that she was his niece, we heard that later but it explained to us how come she knew so much about this man called Billy Graham and said that he was still, though he was in ill health, he was still writing books and in one of his most recent books that I've read called I think Going Home, he talks about the fact that he never expected to get old because he was ill so much in the course of his life and so now he's trying to come to grips with the fact that he can't hear, he's very, very, very weak, has been at death's door a number of times but by God's grace is still alive. Teachers we know, they are shepherds who lead and guide and bind up the wounds of God's people and of course teachers are those who instruct us in the ways of God. But a prophet in the New Testament as well as in the Old Testament is one who speaks for God and here in these concluding verses of Acts chapter 11 we are for the first time in the book of Acts introduced to the concept of prophets and one prophet is named in particular, his name is Agabus. Let's read those two verses again, verse 27 and verse 28, during this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch and they come down, Antioch is north of Jerusalem, but they come down because Jerusalem is at higher elevation. For years I couldn't figure out why upper Canada was down here and lower Canada was up there, it always seemed backwards to me. But it has to do with elevation, Jerusalem is elevated and so from Jerusalem you go down to Antioch even though Antioch is considerably north of Jerusalem. One of them named Agabus stood up and through the spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world and this happened, Luke goes on to tell us, some years later during the reign of Claudius, Agabus the prophet is mentioned one other time in the book of Acts. Let me see how good your Bible knowledge is today. Who knows where else Agabus turns up, Ben? Absolutely you can't all hear probably what Ben is saying, but Agabus occurs one additional time in the book of Acts, in Acts chapter 21 where Paul is on the way to Jerusalem, he has landed in Caesarea staying at the house of Philip the evangelist and then Agabus comes to him, takes Paul's belt, binds his own hands and his own feet and then he says this, the Holy Spirit says in this way the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles and then you have this big scene, everybody says Paul don't go to Jerusalem, Paul says I've got to go there and of course what Agabus has prophesied happens, Paul gets handed over to the Gentiles and that begins Paul's journey into captivity that ultimately at the end leads to his own martyrdom. Now this morning in the time that we have as we look at this story I want to make a couple of observations, hopefully they will help us in our study and understanding of the prophetic office and the first thing that I want to observe is this, that in this passage Agabus is recognized as a prophet, he is recognized as a prophet, that is to say he doesn't just have the gift of prophecy, he occupies the office of prophet and the distinction between the two is very important because the gift of prophecy in the New Testament as well as in the Old Testament is an ability to speak for God, it's to take God's message to other people and to impart to other people what God has to say to them. Sometimes it is for encouragement, sometimes it is for strengthening the faith, sometimes it is for comfort and the gift of prophecy is part and parcel of the package of the baptism of the Holy Spirit that God makes available for all his children on the day of Pentecost and following because you will remember Acts 2 verse 17 where Peter on the day of Pentecost quotes from the Old Testament prophet of Joel and he says in the last days God says I will pour out my spirit on all people. Remember in the Old Testament it was only prophets, priests and kings, in the New Testament it's going to be on all people, that's why it goes on to say your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams. And for that reason Paul in his letter to the Corinthians when he talks about spiritual gifts says that all of God's people should eagerly be desiring spiritual gifts. One Corinthians 14 verse 1 he says follow the way of love but then he goes on to say eagerly desire spiritual gifts especially the gift of prophecy. In other words what he is saying there is that he wants all of us if we name the name of Jesus to be able to hear the prophetic word from God and speak into people's lives for their strengthening, their comfort and their encouragement. Now this can take many different forms. It can take the form of a burden that comes on you for a message that has to be delivered to God's people. For those of us who are sometimes called to publicly speak to God's people that's often the form that it takes for me. Sometimes what will happen is that God simply puts a word there that needs to be communicated as best I can to God's people to help them in their journey for God. And I think there are many of us here who have moments like that where there is a burden on your heart that you want to speak into somebody's life. Sometimes it just happens in the course of a conversation you're talking with somebody and maybe they have a problem or maybe they're sharing a difficulty with you or maybe they are in need of correction in some place and all of a sudden it's like there are words that come out of your mouth and you say where in the world did they ever come from? And I will see later on, you know, not every word you and I speak are from God. There are other places where they can come from. But the gift of prophecy is speaking forth the word of God. But let me say again that there's a difference between the gift of prophecy as I'm describing it here and the office of prophet. Because the office of prophet, a prophet not only has to have the gift of prophecy, but he has a track record in using it and in it bearing fruit so that it is recognized by the rest of the community that defines him as here is a person who is a spokesperson for God and that usually involves a given track record where what you say is accurate, it helps people, it speaks into their lives and it grows them up in Christ. And that's what is happening here with Agabus. He hasn't just got the gift of prophecy. He and the others with him are recognized as prophets in the body. They are, if you will, accepted as, and I don't want to use the word professional because it gets us on the wrong track, but they are people that are recognized by the church as having been called of God to serve as the spokesperson for God's people. It's helpful I think to understand the difference in this way. Most of us here probably are a little bit handy in doing renovations at home. When Michelle and I were visiting Jonathan, he had just renovated his whole kitchen, did a great job on it. There was one wall that was not fully painted and so I painted it. It's what fathers get to do when they visit their children, right? It's sort of taken for granted, I might add, but I did a fine job painting it, I think, but it doesn't make me a professional painter. I mean, I can dab some paint on a wall, but if I see a guy like Franklin or his dad or Fred or other painters in this congregation, I've watched them work, and I'll tell you the speed with which they work, the accuracy with which they work puts me to shame. There is the amateur, but there is the professional, and in Scripture, Agabus is the professional. He is recognized in the church as a prophet of God who has a proven track record, and Luke, in fact, goes on to point out that this famine of which he speaks actually happened years later during the reign of Emperor Claudius. Claudius was an unfortunate dude. There were four major famines during his reign, but this one is clearly identified in the year A.D. 51 as having covered particularly this part of the land. So why do I make a point of that? For the simple reason that as with all spiritual gifts, God's people tend to err to one extreme or another. We either underestimate the importance of our gifts and our contributions, or we overestimate the importance of our gifts and contributions, and in either case, we are off the scale. See, if God only occasionally gives you a word to speak, and there are many other people who speak much better and much more profoundly than you, then what's the tendency? It's to minimize your gift. Who am I? Why should I speak into that person's life? Why should I step out and take a chance? Other people do a much better job. I let them take care of that, and we bury our gift because we don't think it's important. The other extreme is also possible whereby God has used me once in somebody's life, and I think I'm the next best thing to slice bread. And why doesn't the rest of the world recognize my great griftedness, and why don't I get recognized for who I am, and why don't I get honored? And the scripture that I always come back to in that context are these words of Paul in Romans 12 verse 3. I love this passage. "By the grace given to me," he says, Romans 12 verse 3, "I say to every one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you." Think with sober judgment. To minimize your gift is not to be more spiritual. It's to make a liar out of God. To overestimate your gift is not honoring God either. Think with sober judgment to the gifts that God has given you, and then if you read the rest of that passage in Romans chapter 12, he says use your gifts just because you only have one talent. He'll give you the right to bury the talent, and just because you have five talents doesn't mean that you have to go with your nose stuck up in the air as if you're God's gift to the whole church. What have you, says Paul, that you did not receive, and if God gives you something, he gives it so that you can serve him and bless his people. And a lot of the church is paralyzed because too many of us minimize our giftedness, and then the occasional person goes to the other extreme and can't figure out how come nobody recognizes me or honors me. Am I making sense here? Think with sober judgment, and whatever God has given you, don't you dare bury it, because on the final day of judgment you're going to stand before him, and he's going to hold you accountable for every word you have ever spoken. We want to take seriously what it is to belong to Jesus. So Agabus is recognized as a prophet, but not only that, second observation I want to make is that Agabus was part of a team of prophets. Just notice again the passage, during this time some prophets, plural, came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. One of them named Agabus stood up and through the spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. Now usually I think, when we think of prophets, we think of the solitary Old Testament prophet who stands up against the whole world. We think of an Elijah, or an Ezekiel, or a Jeremiah, maybe even a John the Baptist, isolated individuals who carry the whole weight of the world on their shoulders, and who call their culture to repentance and who declare the word of the Lord, and that is an authentic function of the priesthood, of prophets, but if you look at the New Testament role of prophets, it's rather different from that, because if you look at the New Testament prophets, they aren't typically the solitary figures who take on the whole rest of the world, they're part of the leadership team of the church, they serve as the eyes of the body, they discern what is happening behind the scenes, they discern what God is saying and what God wants to do both individually and corporately in the life of the Christian community. Good example of that is two chapters further on in Acts chapter 13 where we have the church at Antioch in prayer, five teachers and prophets are together, and they are fasting, and they're worshipping the Lord, and it's in the context of that prayer meeting, that worship setting that the Holy Spirit comes along and he says to the group, "I want you to set apart for me Saul and Barnabas for the work to which I have called them." And that becomes the next phases we'll see now in the missionary activity in the book of Acts, they terminate their ministry in Antioch and they start out together on that first missionary journey, but it happens in the context of a collective body of teachers and prophets. Now that said, even in the Old Testament, prophets aren't always the solitary figures that we think they are, because particularly during the time of Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha, the Bible talks about companies or schools of prophets, prophets who were together. Listen to these two verses from 2 Kings, the first one from 2 Kings 2 verse 3. It says the company of the prophets at Bethel, take note of that, came out to Elisha and asked, "Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?" "Yes, I know," Elisha replied, "but do not speak of it." This is in the context of Elijah's imminent return to heaven in the chariots of fire. And the Lord has told Elisha that's going to happen, but these prophets who are gathered at Bethel have also received insight from God into that. Then two verses later, 2 Kings 2 verse 5, the company of the prophets at Jericho went up to Elisha and asked him the same kind of question, "Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?" "Yes, I know," he replied, "but do not speak of it." So here, and there are many other references in Samuel and in 1 Kings particularly about companies of prophets who are gathered together. Why these schools of prophets? Well, again, without spending a lot of time on it, I can think of a number of reasons. One is for their protection, because particularly during the days of Elijah, remember who was the king? Ahab, who was the queen? Jezebel. She was no lover of God and lover of the prophets. In fact, we read in 1 Kings 18 verse 4, "While Jezebel was killing off the Lord's prophets, Obadiah had taken a hundred prophets and hidden them in two caves, fifty in each, and had supplied them with food and water." Anybody remember who Obadiah was? Obadiah was in charge of Ahab's palace, but he was a devout believer, and so he had hidden these prophets, a hundred of them, in two caves, fifty each, so that Jezebel couldn't find them and kill them. So to be a prophet is lonely business, did you know that? To see things that the rest of the world is oblivious to, to see into people's lives what their issues are, and to call them to repentance, and to call them to serve the Lord with gladness and with joy, almost always gets you into trouble. I mean, wasn't it Jesus who said in the Sermon on the Mount, "Which of the prophets did your fathers not kill?" Prophets are never popular. And so one of the reasons you have teams of prophets is to provide encouragement and support to each other. Still a third reason, and even more important, I think, than these first two is for training and mentoring. Because as we said earlier, to be a prophet is to speak for God. That's a pretty awesome responsibility. Because first of all, how do you know what God is saying? I mean, isn't that a big issue that we all struggle with? And even if you think God is saying something, how do you interpret what God is saying? Because when God communicates, he doesn't always just make that very clear. God lives on an entirely different plane, and when he gives revelation to his people, it often takes the form of an immediacy. It's hard to describe. You have to experience that to know what it's like, but it's like a light bulb goes on. But then you've got to put it in your own language and in your own words. And just to show you what I mean by that, if you can look at any one of the Old Testament prophets, put their writings side by side, and you will see that while in each case God is the one who is speaking, he isn't speaking separate from who they are or who their personalities are. And so the writings of one apostle in the New Testament is different from the writings of another apostle. The style of one Old Testament prophet is very different from another Old Testament prophet, because you see the word of God comes through you and therefore is colored by who you are. And how accurately we reflect the speaking of God is determined to no small degree by what lives in us and by how we understand what God is saying. And let me tell you from my own experience how easy it is to get that wrong. I've told the story before, and some of you may remember it, and you'll forgive me if I tell it again, but in my last year of college, it was a year of tremendous growth in Christ, a year where we really started, and by we, my friends and I, part of a prayer group, really started taking seriously spiritual gifts, and we said, "Lord, we read about spiritual gifts, this is the time when the charismatic movement is really beginning to hit mainline churches, and there's a lot of talk about life in the Spirit, and we had met some people that we knew were alive in the Spirit, and we said, "Lord, we want spiritual gifts, and we want to have that kind of relationship with you." And in that context, I felt the Holy Spirit was telling me that he wanted me to apply for a position of a dorm resident advisor at Calvon. There was no doubt in my mind at all, and so I stepped into that interview, and I was confident that because the Lord was calling me to this, that this is a position that I would get, I, in a step of faith, didn't even take my umbrella to the prayer meeting for rain, so to speak, made no provision for housing for the rest of that year, because I said, "God has told me I'm going to have this position." I don't know if any of you have ever found yourself out on a limb like that, but it's very disconcerting when the limb gets cut off, because I had the interview, I thought I would get the position, and guess what? I didn't. Now that bothered me intensely, not because I didn't get the position, because that wasn't that important, not even because I had no place to live. My friends, thank God, took care of me and had saved me a place because their faith was not quite as strong as my folly. What bothered me about it, and you'll be able to identify with this if you've ever tried to step out in obedience to the Lord, if this was not the voice of God, then what was I listening to and how could I trust any place if God was speaking to me? Anybody can identify with that? You know, it wasn't about getting the position, it was all about I had opened myself up to the Lord, and I trusted that the Lord was leading, and now what I thought he was saying didn't materialize, so what do you make of that? Took me two years, took me two years to figure that one out, and I figured it out when suddenly the Holy Spirit gave me a moment of revelation, and it was like the Lord said to me, "I never told you you were going to have that position. I told you to apply for the position. I had interpreted it if the Lord wants me to apply for the position, then I'm going to get the position," and suddenly it began to make sense, and it's made me extremely cautious ever since to be careful in saying I know for sure what the Lord is saying. It behooves us all to have a measure of humility because it is so easy to be wrong, and that's where mentoring comes in, you see? These schools of the prophets were being mentored by Samuel, they were being mentored by Elijah because there is an art to learning who God is and how God works, and I'm grateful that in this day and age there are increasingly men and women who have walked this journey before us, who have made the kind of mistakes that they have made so that you and I can benefit from their mistakes and hopefully not make them because there's always a fine line between faith and folly. There's always a fine line between wanting to be obedient to God and really yielding to his authority and to exceed the boundaries that he has established, and we end up not only feeling foolish but looking foolish and doing damage to the kingdom of God. Do you understand what I'm saying? For schools of prophet is the area of accountability because if there's anything that is obvious in the New Testament, it's the importance of testing the spirits, and this ties into what I've just been talking about. We'll read in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, 19 to 22, "Do not quench the spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything, hold fast to what is good, and abstain from every form of evil." Notice the balance there, our temptation is to write off spookiness and say, "I don't understand it, I want nothing to do with it, I know all kinds of horror stories, let me just be logical and rational," and we quench the speaking of God's Holy Spirit. The other danger is that we jump headlong into things that are harmful and wrong because at the end of the day, there is not only the spirit of God, there is the spirit of the evil one, there is our own spirit, and our job collectively and individually is always to test the spirits. I like this verse, 1 John 4 verse 1, "Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." It's always our obligation to test the prophetic word. I would never expect you to take at face value something that I, from a preacher's point of view, tell you without you weighing that word or testing it against scripture or testing it against the orthodoxy of the church. We live in a day and age when multitudes are being led astray simply because they hear fancy sounding things that are not rooted in the authority of Jesus Christ. Always ask yourself the question, where is Jesus in this teaching or in this message that I hear? Does it exalt Jesus? Does it call us to crucify the flesh? Does it call us forth to love God and to love our neighbor? That's the test by which we discern the prophetic word of God. Very quickly, one final point, and that is my third observation, and that is that prophecy is meant to lead to corrective action. Why do these prophets from Jerusalem come down to Antioch? To warn the church. To warn the church about what? Big famine is coming. Why do you need to know that ahead of time? So you can make preparation, that's why. What Old Testament story does this remind you of? Story of Joseph, Pharaoh has the dream, you know, seven good years, seven bad years. It's so that Joseph can step into his role and provide not only for Egypt but more especially for the children of God. And here you see a major difference between what comes from God and what comes from other sources. What comes from God is always intended to move us forward redemptively into the purposes of God. Even if it's a harsh word, even if it's a difficult word, even if it's a painful word, even if it calls us to repentance, it is always a word to help us draw closer to God and to be more fulfilled in his purposes. Kids that come from other places are more often than not intended to fill us with fear, to fill us with paralysis, and to keep us bound instead of setting us free. Let me tell you one more story and I'll close with this. Years ago a young woman, mother, I think she had four kids or something like that came to see me, and she told me how she had been having prophetic dreams over a period of days or weeks. And what really intrigued her was that every time she dreamed one of these dreams, within very short order what she had dreamed would be fulfilled. And so she thought that was really kind of neat until she had her fourth dream. And in the fourth dream she and all her children and her husband were in the house and it caught fire at night and they all perished. She was freaking by the time she came to see me. And she said, "What am I going to do?" And I said to her, "Listen, let's examine this dream of yours because you see this dream is filling you with fright. This dream is not giving you the opportunity to escape the fire because it is just all vague and filled with accusation." And I said, "You know, in my judgment this is not a dream from God. You should not be accepting it. You should be rejecting it." She did. We prayed against it. And the house is still standing and our kids are grown up to this day. God's Word is for encouragement, for instruction, for comfort. It's intended to build us up in Christ. Satan will try to weigh us down with guilt, with accusation, with confusion. And part of testing the spirits is to say, "Lord, is this truly of you, yes or no?" That's why being part of community is so important. Because as we speak into this collectively, we get to understand more and more clearly what God is saying and what God is doing. Let me close with this because in some circles in the Christian church today, personal prophecy is really popular. It's like, "I don't quite know what God is wanting me to do, so I'll go to some conference someplace and I'll have somebody prophesy over me." Now I have no doubt that there are instances in which God really speaks into people's lives. But I also know that when you go out looking for personal prophecy, it's a hop, skip, and a jump into clairvoyance where you are asking somebody else to tell you what the Holy Spirit should be telling you or confirming in you. And it's one thing for somebody to have a prophetic word and to speak into somebody's life supernaturally and to know that God is speaking deeply into your heart and it encourages you in Christ and shows you the way. I believe that happens, maybe not a whole lot, but it happens. And that's one way in which God leads us. But be careful, be careful that we don't just get so hungry for supernatural direction, that we avoid Scripture, that we open ourselves up to things that may or may not be from God, and that can cause huge grief to the body of Christ. As a church, we are committed to walking in the Spirit, you know that by now. As a church, we're committed for spiritual gifts to be released among God's people and for us to learn how to live in it and how to grow in it. And the starting place for that, for each one of us, is to rededicate our lives to Christ and say, "My life is not my own. It's not for me to decide what spiritual gift you want to give me." Some of us are the mouth, some of us are the eyes, some of us are the ear, some of us are the hand. There are a variety of gifts, a variety of workings. It is the same Spirit who inspires them in us all. And to see the body of Christ come to maturity, as every part begins to live and to function in the life of the Spirit with the gifting that God gives, then Jesus has a way of showing himself to the world, doesn't he? If we can speak the words of God, if we can be the hands of God, if we can be the feet of Jesus, if our lives are surrendered to him, there's no telling how God can demonstrate his presence and his reality through you and through me. And I'll tell you this much, tough as it is sometimes to serve the Lord and to obey him and to honor him, to know that you are used of God even once in your life to bless somebody else's life will change you forever. Because I can tell you there is nothing like knowing I have stood in the presence of God and I have seen him move not only in me but through me to bless other people. Will you recommit yourselves this day to being the hands and the feet and the mouth and the ears of Jesus so that living in us he may show himself through us to bring life and light and healing to the nations? That's our job. And he has said, "I'll be with you always and I will give you the Holy Spirit and through [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:47:02.520; remove through 00:49:55.000] the Holy Spirit you'll be able to do far more abundantly than all that you ask or think [CUT]." ♪ Let them flow in endless praise Let them flow in endless praise ♪ ♪ Take my voice and let me sing Always, only for my King ♪ ♪ Take my lips and let them be Filled with messages from me ♪ ♪ Filled with messages from me ♪ ♪ Take my silver and my gold God of mine, put I with hope ♪ ♪ Take my intellect and views Every power and sound shall choose ♪ ♪ Every power and sound shall choose ♪ ♪ Take my will and make it thine It shall be no longer mine ♪ ♪ Take my heart and it is I know It shall be my royal throne ♪ ♪ It shall be my royal throne ♪ ♪ Take my love, my Lord, my power At thy feet its treasures store ♪ ♪ Take myself and I will be Ever, only, only for thee ♪ ♪ Ever, only, only for thee ♪♪ [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:49:55.000; resume after this marked segment]