The Following Message Has Been Transcribed For

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What is happening in this hour is that Christ is meeting the people right where they are. I am never criticizing anybody. There is nothing at all wrong with a preacher standing up and giving a prepared message. I do it myself. There is nothing wrong with it, but in this hour, the Lord is moving to meet people right where they are. The truth of the matter is that no matter how anointed a minister's message is, if the person sitting there listening to it is not ready to receive that message, it will go right over their head. It is going right past them or maybe they will grab hold of one little bit, and it will help them.

 

The ideal ministry is to meet people right where they are, right where they are learning at that moment, right what they need to hear at that moment to take some victory in their life. That is the ministry of Christ. Everybody cannot do it. When Christ is in you, that is what you do. You meet the people right where they are.

 

Let me remind you that there are two kinds of ministry. There is the ministry of the natural man who is just a human being who studies, who knows the Bible, and means well. He will share with you what he has learned. He is a natural man who is sharing his experience or his knowledge with you.

 

Then there is the man in whom Christ is being formed. When Christ is being formed in you, to a measure of maturity that He is manifesting through you, it is not your natural person, it is not your carnal mind that knows what the Bible says. It is not the experiences of your carnal mind, but it is the knowledge of Christ in you, reaching out to the individual, telling them what they need to hear at that exact moment in their life, to help them get over some kind of crisis or to give them what they need so that they can continue to grow in Christ. That is the ideal ministry.

 

When it is in full stature, it is the ideal ministry. It is not in full stature in this hour, but it is operating, it is functioning. Not many ministers would put themselves on the line. I know one minister on Long Island that I have seen do it. He will take a few questions. I have never seen any other minister put himself on the line where he will have a few hundred people in front of him, and he will take questions.

 

Yes, Pat Robertson does it too. I know two ministers that I am aware of in this hour who will do this.

 

There may be more that I am just not aware of. It is not typical. Why? It is very hard. If somebody asks you a question that you do not know the answer to, it can be very embarrassing. It can be embarrassing for you and also some of the people listening to the answers can stumble. Young Christians tend to idolize the ministers. That is not a good thing. It can make them lose confidence where they will say, "Why should I study with him?"

 

Even if a minister cannot answer a question, that does not mean you cannot study with him. Nobody knows everything. There are a lot of problems involved with standing up in front of a couple of hundred people or a smaller group and saying, "Ask me." I want to tell you right now, if you are not prepared to admit it when you do not know the answer, you really should not be engaging in that kind of a ministry. You could do more damage than good if you cannot say, "I simply do not know." If you try to cover it up and fill in with something that is not true, just to cover up your own nakedness, you could do more harm than good.

 

It is a very difficult ministry, but it is a ministry that appears in Christ. Every ministry that appears in Christ will find some natural men doing it in the form of a gift. When it is coming forth from the Christ that is being formed in you, it is not a gift. When it is Christ that is being formed in you, everything that Christ does is being done through you. Everything that Christ does is being done through you in some measure, not in the full maturity, but in some measure. That is how you could tell the difference.

 

If there is a man who is only doing one of the things that Christ does, then it is a gift. He has got one aspect of what Christ does. One of the signs that Christ is being formed in a man is that they are doing everything or most of the things that Christ does in some measure. Does anybody not know what I just said?

 

There is such a thing as a gift. The gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. Jesus healed people. If you find a man that has a gift of healing, he has one gift. He prays for people and they get healed. That is not enough reason for you to assume that he has the nature of Christ. He has a spiritual gift, which the Bible clearly tells us is given to men without them having the nature of Christ.

 

They could be some very wicked men that have the gift of healing. Some very wicked men cast out demons. Some very wicked men pray for you, and all kinds of good things happen in your life. You have to know that.

 

Every day there are some young disciples somewhere, spiritually tumbling down backwards, because some man that they knew, who has the gift of healing, cheated them out of money or wound up in adultery or some obvious sin. The young disciple just goes tumbling down. No one ever bothered to tell them that these gifts are given to men who are natural men, and natural men all sin, every one of them. If they try to tell you that they do not, they are lying. You had better go someplace else.

 

Every man sins. All men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The reason that we sin is that our very nature is sin. It is impossible for man, as we know him, not to sin. Jesus Christ of Nazareth was a man who was raised from the dead. Christ, being raised from the dead, we are told in the book of Romans, sinneth no more. Once you are raised from the dead, you do not sin anymore.

 

As long as you are dying, as long as your body is aging, if you have any form of infirmity, whatsoever, you know that you have not been raised from the dead. When you are raised from the dead, it will be reflected in your body. Your body will be preserved. It will not get sick, it will not die, it will not age.

 

Paul was bit by a snake, and he threw the snake off. We are told in the book of Acts that this snake bite happened to him on a primitive island. First of all, he was on a ship that was shipwrecked, and he was washed up on the shore. When the natives saw that he was bit by a snake after being saved from the shipwreck, they said, "Oh boy, this guy is really cursed now."

 

Those of you who are familiar with the Scripture know that I am changing the words. I am trying to put it in understandable English. The natives said, "This guy has some curse on his life. He is on a ship that is wrecked at sea, and he escapes death, winds up getting washed ashore, and some snake comes along and bites him. This guy has death written all over him, and there is nothing he can do to escape it." That was what they said, and they waited to see him die, but he did not die. Then they said, "He must be a god."

 

When the Christ in you is raised to full stature, it affects your body in the form of preservation. Your body becomes preserved and defensed against disease, and every form of external destruction which produces death; snake bites, tick bites, and viruses. That is how we know whether someone has been raised from the dead or not.

 

We have to know that you can have gifts from God, and that you could have knowledge from God and not be raised from the dead. There are people in the Church, today, including myself, who are equipped to give you information and spiritual blessings that can really benefit you, but we are not raised from the dead. That means the day that you see us mess up, if you go tumbling backwards, after you hear this message, you are not a wise person.

 

Why would you lose whatever good thing God has given to you because you see an imperfect man go tumbling backwards? The Scripture says, if that happens, either you were totally misinformed, or you are guilty of idolatry. You are blessed by somebody that helps you and has a lot of knowledge and wisdom. They have lots of good things from God, but you have, somewhere back in the back of your unconscious mind said, "They will never disappoint me. They will never let me down or make a mistake or mess up." That is calling what is imperfect, perfect, and God calls it idolatry. It is a sin, and you are going to get hurt. It is a trick.

 

Ask God to help you to take every good thing from everybody that is in some position to minister Christ to you, take Christ from them, but know that they are not perfect. Do not get messed up when you see their imperfection. Glory to God.

 

Nobody expects a doctor to be perfect. Everybody knows doctors mess up. It is just an immaturity in the Church. We have to grow up. Children do it with their parents. Little children think they cannot survive without their parents. They do not understand, if God forbid, their parents were to die, that some other adult would take care of them. In a society like this, some other adult would take care of them. They would be put somewhere until they were old enough to take care of themselves.

 

It is just spiritual childishness, and the day comes when we must see imperfection in God's ministry. The more you are prepared for it, the better you are because it is painful. It is painful.

 

Remember, that no matter what your need is, that Jesus is the one that answers your needs. Ministers are servants of God. If you believe that the minister is going to answer your every need, you are sure to be disappointed and hurt. Know that the one who answers your every need is Jesus. He can answer it through whatever minister He desires to answer it through, but Jesus is perfect. Men are imperfect. Jesus will meet your need through imperfect men.

 

We see a lot of people in the Church having a problem separating the perfection of Jesus from the imperfection of the man that He is flowing through. It is very important that you make a difference between the two, that you distinguish between the perfect Christ and the imperfect man. Why? For your own sake. If you think the man is perfect, the day must come that you find out that he is not perfect, and you are going to be hurt. Glory to God.

 

I do not have a prepared message for you tonight. I am going to go with the Lord. I did not have one last Thursday, and it turned out pretty good, so let us see what happens. I was telling you about the dream that I woke up with, that I was preaching and I was restricted to a certain amount of time, and the people did not want the preaching. They wanted the questions. It was just like in Nigeria. They were standing up, hungry for that word. Someone else here had a dream this morning also. Her dream was that the building across the street from where we live was condemned. All the people came over to my apartment, and the place was packed with people. They were all in the house eating there, sleeping there, lying on the floors, and there was no room for anybody.

 

I had a dream at least a year or two ago, that I was going to be preaching in Florida. I never thought it would be this particular ministry, but I did have a dream that I would be preaching in Florida, and when I got there, all the old crew was there. I could never figure out that dream, but I think what it means is that God has a lot of people that spent many years studying Deliverance and studying Sonship, and they are called to this message. For whatever reason, there has been a separation for this period of time.

 

I think that all the dreams put together, really means that God is getting ready to send this message to a lot of faithful people, that for whatever reason, have not heard about it. We will see what He is going to do. As far as the house across the street being condemned, I remind you that the soul realm is opposite of the spirit realm.

 

I think it is the message that is coming out of the soul realm that is being condemned. The message that is coming out of the carnal minds of men is being condemned. It is time for the spiritual truth of Christ to come forth. Jesus said to the Pharisees, "I will tell you the truth, and the truth will set you free."

 

The Pharisees were enraged at Him. "What do you mean, you are going to tell >us' the truth? We have the truth." What they did not understand was that they had the written word, and they had their carnal minds interpretation of the written word. Jesus said, "I have come to give you the Spirit of the Word because in the Spirit of the Word is life."

 

There are good things in the written word. I think we touched on this Thursday night. If you obey the Ten Commandments, you will reap what you sow. Good things will happen to you.

 

Your life will be better rather than worse, but in the Spirit of the Word is the resurrection of the dead. There is no resurrection from the dead in the letter of the word. For two thousand years, we have had a whole world full of people reading this Book and they have not understood that what is in this Book has to get inside of you to raise you from the dead. They just have not been able to understand it, but they believed it with the measure of faith that they have.

 

They repeated it over and over again, and they have come to the conclusion that since it is two thousand years, and we do not see anybody raised from the dead besides the man, Jesus, it must be after your body dies that you are raised from the dead. They saw the man, Jesus of Nazareth, have His body crucified, and they saw Him raised from the dead.

 

What they are going over, because they have no answer for it, is we see all of these people dying for two thousand years, and they are not coming and appearing to us unless you are witnessing a demon. They are not coming back. Jesus came back. He came back and appeared to five hundred witnesses.

 

Five hundred people saw Jesus raised from the dead. Five hundred holy people, five hundred practicing religious Jews saw Him. They were not someone that had the DT's. They saw Him raised from the dead. The Church world, for two thousand years, could not understand. They believed that the Word is true, but it is not happening. For two thousand years it has not happened. Rather than lose faith, the carnal mind got in there and gave some answers. "Jesus' body died, so it must be that everybody's body dies, and they must be alive on the other side of the veil." For some reason, God is not showing them to us like He showed us the man, Jesus. God must have a reason.

 

This is what is preached in many churches across the world today, that in the time of the resurrection of the dead, Jesus is coming back to this world. I do not know how they think He is going to do it.

 

Oh, they say He is going to cover the whole world at one time, and go to all of these graveyards that you see with the crosses over a mound of dirt. He is going to go and dig up all these graves and get all these bodies back, which are now skeletons. He is going to get all these bodies back and take the souls that passed into heaven and put them back into their body, as we see it described in the book of Ezekiel.

 

In the book of Ezekiel, God says to the prophet Ezekiel, "Prophesy to those bones. Oh bones, can you live again?" The Scripture says that they lived again, and Ezekiel saw flesh come on the bones, and the breath of life went back into them.

 

Brethren, this is a spiritual book, especially when you get into prophesy. I want to tell you today, that it is not true that anyone is coming and digging up graves all over the world from the last two thousand years and taking these skeletons out of the graves and putting these souls from the other side of the veil back in the skeletons and watch the flesh come back on them.

 

That is not how it is going to happen. That is man's carnal mind filling in the answers that are not clear. That is man's carnal mind filling in the answers that are only found in the mind of Christ. They are found in the mind of Christ. They are not found in the Holy Spirit. They are in Christ. The Holy Spirit is not a mind. The Holy Spirit comes to lead you to Christ, and Christ is the mind. That means people that have the Holy Spirit are still, in a great measure, in a fantasy. Some people that have the mind of Christ are still in a great measure of fantasy, but if you have the mind of Christ, God is working well in you to bring you into all truth.

 

There is a big conflict in the Church today. We have millions of people calling themselves Christians, and I am not saying they are not Christians. They have a lot of power, but they are declaring the doctrines of their carnal mind as the truth of God's word. We have the same situation that we had when Jesus appeared on the earth. He came to the Pharisees as a man raised from the dead, in full stature, with the full mind of God. He had all knowledge that God had. It was in the man, Jesus.

 

He went to the Pharisees, the people to whom the oracles of God were given, and He said to them, "I am going to tell you the truth." They said, "What is this man talking about?" "I am going to tell you the Spirit of the Word, and it is the Spirit of the Word that is going to set you free." Set you free from where? Set you free from what? Set you free from hell! Where is hell? This world that you live in. You need to be set free from the hell that is in your mind.

 

They said to Jesus, "And who do you think you are, thinking that you have knowledge that we do not have?" They pointed out what they thought was a sin in His life. They told Him He was born of fornication, but we know that the Scripture says that the Holy Ghost hovered over Mary and impregnated her. The carnal minds of that day insinuated that she had fornicated with her fiancee before marriage. He came to give them life, and the Word that was going to raise them from the dead, and they not only denied Him, but they pointed out what they thought were His sins.

 

In this hour, if you are a member of the Two-Witness Company, if Christ is being formed in you, but you are not in full stature, you are moving in this ministry in some measure. You are going to people, and you are telling them, "I have some truth. I have some truth, and I have some measure of the Spirit of the Word. It has the power to raise you from the dead, and in that resurrection you are going to be set free from hell in your mind and hell in this world system."

 

The Church world out there, by and large, the majority of them, are saying to the few preachers that are preaching it, "Who do you think you are?" They are pointing out their sins, which are very real. With Jesus, it was not real, it was a lie. For the members of the Two-Witness Company, if God sends you, if you are a member of the Two-Witness Company, you will have sin because you are not in full stature.

 

Prepare yourself. When God sends you to someone, to give them a word, this is the test. You know who is answering you if their response to you is to point out your sins. You know you are dealing with the carnal mind, because Christ does not do that. Christ does not point out your sins when you go to tell them something that they do not like to hear.

 

Anybody know what Christ does? Christ says, "I will pray about it. I will pray about it because if what you are telling me is true, I want to know. If you see sin in me, and I do not know that it is there, if God has really sent you to tell me because I am blind to this sin, I want to know. If it is the truth, I want it." That is what Christ says. That is what a man who is answering by the mind of Christ says. A man answering by the carnal mind says, "Who do you think you are? This is what you are like. I saw you in this sin. You think you are perfect. You are not perfect."

 

That is what the carnal mind says. You know who you are talking to by the words that they say. By the words that they say, you know what they are thinking, and those words are the words of a murderer. Jesus said, "Your father is the devil, and he was a murderer from the beginning." What do you mean your father is the devil? The spirit who fathered the mind that is speaking out of your mouth was the devil because a mind is something that is born of two spirits.

 

In the man, Jesus of Nazareth, He said, "My Father is God." He said, "I am the Son of God, and I am the son of man." The Spirit of God was His Father and the human spirit in man was His mother. The product of this union was the mind of Christ, but to all of us who are born with a carnal mind, our father is the devil. We have the same mother. She is the harlot. She has two husbands, and she has two children, one from each husband. The human spirit of man is our mother.

 

In this hour, those of us in whom Christ is being formed are in the midst of the war of the ages, as to which mind is going to possess this body. This body is a slave. This is a real easy one, if you just look up this word, "body," in your Strong's Concordance. The Greek word is "soma." It means "slave."

 

This body is an android. It is a robot that serves the mind which dwells in it, but it is a very high order android. It is attached to the mind. You cannot separate them without killing the body. It does not look like it does in Star Trek where you cut a piece of skin away, and you see all these sparkling flashing lights in there and all the wires and everything.

 

Let me ask you a question. That is man's concept of an android. Is our body so different? A doctor takes a knife, and he slits you down the middle, rolls back the skin and you have a heart and lungs pumping away. What is the difference of cutting someone open and seeing little wires and flashing lights? It is just a different way of looking at it. God has one imagination, and man has another imagination.

 

This body is just a machine. That is all that it is. This body is a machine that is ruled by the mind, and I am not talking about your brain. The organic brain controls this body, but there is a brain that is spiritual that controls the organic brain, and its name is "mind." There is a spiritual force that controls every aspect of this body including the organic brain.

 

It is the master brain. It is called the mind which is in the body, and this body is a reflection of that mind. It is an image of that mind. It can be likened to a movie picture image. When you watch a movie picture, and you see people moving around on the screen, you know that if you go up and try to grab them, you cannot grab them. It is just light.

 

This fallen mind, which is called the carnal mind, his name is death. He is of such a high spiritual level compared to every individual in this world, but he is not as high as God. The Bible says that he is a man and his name is death, but he still has an existence. He is of such a higher order than we are, that when he casts his projection or his image or his shadow, it looks like us.

 

The Scripture uses all of these words. When he casts his shadow, it looks like us. We are not on a flat screen. We are three dimensional, and we have an existence, and we feel pain, and we experience happiness. It is a much higher level than the moving picture that we see on the screen. Nevertheless, that is what this body is. He does anything with us that he wants. He thinks and we do, except that there is a restraining force in this world.

 

There is a restraining force. In this hour, His name is Christ. Before Jesus Christ of Nazareth was in the world, God was always in the world in some measure. I have talked to you about that. His law is in the world. This Bible is so simplified. In the book of Genesis, when God said to Adam, "Thou shalt not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil," that sounds real simple. You could tell it to a kindergarten child. Right? When the Living God spoke those words, what happened was that commandment was impressed on the chromosomes of the man. I think we mentioned this last week.

 

There are not many jungles left in this world. There are a few tribes in South America that I have heard about recently that are still living like they lived in the Stone Age. I think they just found one in Brazil somewhere.

 

If you go as far away from civilization as you could possibly go, they have these laws written in their mind. They know you honor your parents. They know you do not murder. They know you do not steal. They know you take care of your children. How do they know? They walk around in loin cloths. They do not read or write. They do not have any written history. How do they know? It is in their very chromosomes.

 

The evil that is in this place called hell is modified. God did not leave us without anything, because if He left us without anything, we would not be doing as well as we are doing down here in hell. That man, he is a man, his name is death. He is a super brain, who is the chief honcho over all of our organic brains and over our individual human spirit and what he wants us to do, we do, with one exception. We have some protection, to whatever degree, from either what we have been taught by God or the good works that our ancestors have done in serving righteousness. That is the only thing between an individual and death and the works of death.

 

Death is not just a cessation of existence. Death is torment. Hell hath torment. Hell is the place and Death is the name of the man. They go hand-in-hand. There is torment associated with death. For two thousand years the Catholic Church, and other churches are preaching that your body dies, and you go to that place where they burn you with fire and stick you with pitchforks, and you have torment continuously.

 

It is not when your body dies. It happened when your spirit died. It is right here. The torment, and the pitchforks, and the destruction is directly proportionate to the degree with which your defenses have been eaten away, because of sin on the family line, and because of sin in your own life.

 

In this country today, we are tearing down every Christian rule. I do not know whether you know it or not, but if God lets it happen, Christianity is going to be wiped out in this nation. We are going back to paganism. They are tearing down every law that God has established in this nation. Judgment does not fall right away. It may not fall for another forty, fifty or one hundred years. We see, countries being blessed or cursed, depending on the spiritual forces that are ruling over them.

 

A minister in Venezuela told me that they worship a female deity in Venezuela. They have a lot of paganism, and idolatry, and witchcraft. He said that the people come out into the streets. They do not have temples, so they come out into the streets. They gather in the streets, and they praise this female deity. I forgot her name. They praise her, and they worship her, and they cry out to her until she manifests. She manifests. She appears up in the sky.

 

There really is only one female deity. In every society she takes a different name, but her true name is Satan. She is a female. Satan is female. She is the female deity that exists across this world. If you study ancient religions or if you study religion, you will find that out. I have not studied it that deeply, but to the best of my knowledge, when you study pagan religion, the deity, the god, is always female. The god is always female.

 

It is just Judaism and Christianity where God is male. Did you ever wonder why? It is because this whole world is the domain of Satan. Every area where we see Christianity and Judaism which worship the true God, these pockets, or these areas, or these people have only been taken by a warfare maneuver from the Living God to gather unto Himself a people.

 

If the Lord withdraws, the whole world goes into the pagan worship of a female deity, because Satan is the god of this world. He is the Prince of the power of the air. If you are confused, because I am going back and forth between he and she, I will comment on that.

 

Satan is female in regard to God, in relationship to God. She was made to be female and in subjection to the mind of Christ, but she came out of her place. She took an ungodly authority, and this world was formed, called hell, or the land of Nod, and she is the god of this world.

 

To this world she is male. To this world, she is male, but her true nature is female. That is why, when she can get people to worship her as a female, she prefers it, because she is really a female. When she has to, she will take the form of a male, but her true nature is female, and she knows it, and she desires worship as a female goddess.

 

Wherever you see a female goddess manifesting or receiving worship, I suggest to you that it is Satan, whatever name she is using. It is that female goddess who has projected this image. This whole world is an illusion. This whole world is an illusion. The only reality here is the spirit, which we are. This body is an illusion. You say to me, "Pastor Vitale, what are you talking about? If you cut my arm off, it hurts me."

 

The only reason we feel pain if this arm is cut off is because the mind in us is in a very low realm. The mind in us is so low that it is lower than this world. This world is an image of the mastermind, Satan. We, as individuals, are subject to this world and therefore we feel the pain.

 

I want to tell you that when your mind becomes Christ, if someone cuts your arm off, you can grow out another arm. When your mind becomes Christ, if someone cuts your arm off, you not only will not feel the pain, but you will be just like one of those androids in Star Trek. You will get another arm. The only reason we feel pain now, and we have the problems that we have now, is because our mind is on a lower realm than this very body, if you can hear it.

 

The Scripture says, "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind." It does not mean the renewing of your carnal mind. You have got to get a new mind. You have to get the mind of Christ and when the mind of Christ is the mind that is ruling this flesh, you will be able to say as Jesus said, "No man taketh my life unless I agree that it should be laid down."

 

I declare to you that if Jesus allowed Himself to be killed under any circumstances other than the crucifixion, He would have gotten up and walked away. The reason He permitted Himself to be crucified was why? Does anybody remember why? He was taunted when He was on the cross. They said, "Let us see you get yourself down from the cross." Why did He not help Himself? Does anybody remember?

 

If He helped Himself, the authority that was in Christ, was to restore Himself to the condition that He was at. He knew that if He agreed, submitted to that crucifixion, that not He, but the Father, was going to raise Him from the dead in a higher or more spiritually mature form than He was in when He was crucified. That, He could not do for Himself. The Father had to do it. That is why He did not come down off the cross.

 

When the Father raised Him from the dead, He was in which stage of the resurrection? The third stage of the resurrection. He was fully born into the realm of the Spirit. He was converted into pure Spirit. The matter that His body was made out of was transmuted into Spirit.

 

What do you think happened to His body? There was no body found. We know He took many different forms after the resurrection, one of which was a ball of light. He appeared to Paul as a ball of light. What happened to His body? Did you ever wonder what happened to His body? The matter that His body was made of was infused with such a high energy source, His name is the Father, that it changed the cells of His body into another substance. It was not wasted. The body was not wasted, but it was transmuted.

 

Our scientists know that this is possible. I was speaking to a scientist not too long ago. This is what the one I was speaking to told me. "Our scientific community knows that it is possible, that it would require such a high level of energy and that such a level of energy is not known in this hour. We have powerful bombs today, but the most powerful bomb that we have today, the most powerful energy source that we have today, is not strong enough to transmute matter." The mind of Christ and the mind of the Father that was in it, was so powerful that it transmuted the matter of His body, and He was fully born into the realm of the Spirit.

 

Nothing was wasted, and he was raised from the dead in a form that made Him a superior man who had the ability to take any form He wanted to take. We see this in witchcraft today. I have spoken to people who have seen it. I want to tell you, everything you see in the movies exists. I use to think it was fantasy. It is not fantasy.

 

In countries where they have been practicing witchcraft openly for generations, there are men who change into animals. They have the power to change into an animal and change back, but let me tell you something, when you are doing this kind of thing by the spirit of witchcraft, you can only transmute downward. You go from man to animal. Some of them turn themselves into trees, I am told. They transmute downward, but when the Living God transmutes you, you transmute upward. You do not become an animal, brethren. You become a god.

 

I want to tell you, everything that Jesus did and is capable of doing, we see it in this world, if you look hard enough for it. You see the same thing being done by a witchcraft power, but it is always negative. It is always negative, the reverse, the opposite of what God does. It is the same thing, but the other side of it and it kills you.

 

The exercise of negative spiritual power eventually will kill you. The exercise of positive spiritual power eventually will raise you from the dead. That is why from the time that Christ begins to be formed in you, the more effort and time you put into using Him, to thinking out of His mind, speaking out of His mouth, and doing whatever spiritual deeds you are doing, the more His energy is increasing in you, the more His energy is touching your soul, and touching your body and transforming it.

 

In this hour it is a slow process because He is not fully born in us, but if He is there, if the mind of Christ is being formed in you, there is power within you. There is power to change. There is power to transmute upward. It is there. Depending on how heavy the curses are on your life and in your mind, it could take a little less time or a little more time. He is opposing the powers of darkness in your life.

 

There is only one catch. You have to do it God's way. If you come up against a stumbling block where you really cannot see it God's way, if you want this change in your life, you are going to have to say, "Father, I want to know if that is really your word." You are going to hear it from an imperfect man, and you have a right to question everything you hear.

 

For your own good, if you really want this power of God in your life to produce change, you are going to have to say, "Father, is that person telling me the truth? I cannot see it, and I do not believe it. It does not sound right, but if it is true, let me believe it because I want this power in my life." If you cannot do that, you are hindering yourself.

 

If it comes to a point where God witnesses to you that your thoughts are wrong, and why would your thoughts be wrong? It is because God says your thoughts are wrong. You are going to have to, at least, tell Him that you are willing to change if He will help you to change, because it is the mind that produces life or death. If you are thinking the thoughts of your carnal mind, and you think they are God, the power that is flowing through you is not life, but it is death, and you are the only one who is deceived.

 

As the mind of Christ enters into you, He touches your soul, He touches your body, He touches your life and He even touches this external world. I cannot explain this to you, and I really have no explanation for you, but I know that this physical world out there is hell. You know it is pretty well set because it decays.

 

We all know that, but when the power of God is flowing in your life, it can even affect the external world. If you have a farm that is not producing, your farm will start to flourish. You can see it in people's households.

 

I know I prayed for somebody once. He had gone through a bad experience. I honestly do not remember what it was, but they had lost most of their furniture. The house was empty. I prayed for them that God would restore. They had no money to buy new furniture. As far as the world was concerned, they may have lived the rest of their life without furniture in their house.

 

I asked God to restore their furniture. I went to their house about a year later. I had been there and had seen the empty rooms. I could not believe my eyes. There was a piano. Do you know what a piano cost? There was a piano sitting in the living room with all new furniture and wallpaper. The house was beautiful. God did not just give them furniture. It was beautiful. I just stared at it. I never asked them where they got it from.

 

I just stared at it, and I had a revelation that even though this physical globe is going to be hell, possibly for another fifteen hundred years, God can touch our personal portion of it, if you can hear what I am saying. He can touch our personal portion of it. He can either prosper or not prosper.

 

Did you ever meet somebody who cannot grow a plant? Every time they touch a plant, it rots. It dies because there is death all over them. There is death coming out of their very person. There is death permeating out of them.

 

Some people, when you walk into their house, they just have a knack to make it look beautiful, to make it look homey. All the plants prosper and grow. Sometimes it affects people's cooking. It affects everything that is a sign of life. Either there is a spirit of death on it, or there is a spirit of life on it, and it is projecting from your mind.

 

I talked not too long ago about the fact that it is my opinion that all these people who claim they are being abducted by space aliens, that these aliens are coming from within their own mind. I have believed that for a long time. There seems to be more and more publicity about these abductions.

 

I just happened to turn on Sally Jessy Raphael today, and she was interviewing a group of people who claim their houses are haunted. There were a couple of skeptics there who were saying there is no such thing as a ghost, and there was a whole big controversy. One woman stood up in the audience, who seemed to have some experience with it, and she said, houses are not haunted, people are haunted.

 

Then this man, who looked like a very normal, average type man, stood up and said his wife and his family purchased one house, and it was haunted. They sold the house, and they moved to another brand new house and it was haunted. They have these ghosts with them wherever they go. Then the woman stood up and said, "It is not the house that is haunted, but it is the people."

 

I listened to that and I said, "Wow, they should give the tape of this show to the people that are being abducted by the aliens.

 

It is all in your mind. Your life is a manifestation of your mind. Your body is a manifestation of your mind. Your home is a manifestation of your mind. Your family or lack of it is a manifestation of your mind. We have people in this world that try to help us from the outside. We have doctors that cut us open, and sometimes they do us some good. I am not against doctors. Sometimes they do good and sometimes you die. Sometimes people go into the hospital to have their hangnail cut off, and they get gangrene and they die. Sometimes they help you, and sometimes they do not.

 

Then you have psychiatrists out there who help, and sometimes they do not, but they are doing it from the outside in. When Jesus heals you, it is from the inside out, just like a microwave cooks from the inside out. When He fixes what is wrong with you, spiritually, it is reflected in every aspect of your life. It is reflected in your mind. It is reflected in your soul, which is your emotions. It is reflected in your body. It is reflected in your relationships. It is reflected in your home. It is reflected in the physical area where you live.

 

Everything is within, because our true reality is within. Did Jesus not say, "The Kingdom of God is within you?" Everything that is spiritual is within you. Brethren, I declare to you it is irrational to say that the Kingdom of God is within you and that the kingdom of darkness is outside of you. If you are deceived, you are only deceiving yourself.

 

The Scripture talks about two kinds of people. Scripture says there are only two kinds of people, either you are wise or you are foolish, so when I call you a fool, I am not insulting you. It is a Scriptural term. Either you are wise or you are foolish. I want to tell you that if you are one of these people who are so distressed at the thought that the kingdom of darkness can be within you, you are foolish, because spiritual kingdoms are within. It is like saying you deny physical disease.

 

I knew a man who denied cancer. He was so afraid of getting cancer that he said, "I do not believe it exists." Someone knocked on his door asking for donations for the Cancer Fund, and he said, "I am sorry, but I do not believe in cancer and he closed the door." It is time to grow up. You see, people are afraid. They are afraid, because outside of Christ, which they do not know about, there are no weapons against these spiritual happenings.

 

The average person looks at Christianity, and whether they would use my words or not, they probably would not use my words, but on some level they look at Christianity today, and they say that this is a powerless religion. It is powerless. First of all, the average person that looks at it thinks of the Roman Catholic Church. For whatever reason this seems to be the situation in this country.

 

Every time the news media talks about Christianity, it is typified by the Roman Catholic Church. They see people going to mass once a week, going into the confessional once a week, getting down on their knees, crossing themselves, saying a rosary and going home. No power, no power, no power, no power!

 

You see a similar thing in the Lutheran Church, in the Methodist Church, and in the Episcopalian Church. There is some power in the Pentecostal Church, some power, but there is not the needed kind of power in the Church today. I believe that it is there, but it is very hidden. In the visible Church, there is not the kind of power that is going to oppose being abducted by an alien or being harassed by a ghost who follows you wherever you go. It is there, it is present, in many instances, but not in all instances. It depends on how severe the curses are on your life, and we have a whole Church world saying that a Christian cannot be cursed.

 

I saw that one movie about people who are being abducted by aliens. There was one woman who kept getting abducted. They showed her sitting down to dinner with her family. Her husband was obviously just some nominal Christian. I did not see anything on him at all that would indicate the life of Christ was present on him. He was a verbal Christian. They sat down to eat, and he prayed over his family, and he said, "Dear God, please keep my wife safe in the Name of Jesus, amen." She ate her dinner, got up from the table and met the alien waiting for her in the hallway.

 

There is no power in the words. Brethren, there is power in the Spirit, and the Kingdom of God is within you. The Kingdom of God is where God is. He is within you. If the power is not manifesting in you, you are powerless. Does the Scripture not say that in the last days, there will be many talking about God, but they are going to be denying the power thereof. They are denying the power thereof. It is just exercising, yapping at the mouth, repeating routine religious prayers. There is no power in it.

 

There are a lot of people out there that do not know there is a Church with power. They really do not know that there is a Church with power. There are just very small groups. As I said, there is some power in the Church, different levels of it. The more intense the power, the smaller the group, and the harder to find the person that has power with God.

 

I remind you of Naaman. Naaman was a Syrian army officer who had leprosy. He heard that there was a prophet in Israel that might be able to cure him, so he traveled from Syria to Israel. He had no idea where this man of God was, so where did he go? He went to the king. He went to the visible head of Israel. Under the old covenant, there was a separation between the prophet and the king. The kings just had authority to rule over the country. They had no spiritual authority at all.

 

Naaman did not know this. He did not know anything about Judaism, just as people today know very little about Christianity. Even people that call themselves Christians know very little about Christianity. Naaman went to the king and scared the king half to death. The king said to him, "Why are you coming to me asking me to heal you? What kind of power are you imputing to me that God should get mad at me and strike me dead?" It was illegal for the king to try and cross over, or usurp, or enter into the authority of the prophet. God could strike you dead.

 

Who is the king that did that and died? It was King Saul who took on the authority of the priest. He offered a sacrifice unto God, and the end of it was that he died.

 

The Assyrian, Naaman, comes to Israel and he has no idea about the rules of God's kingdom. He is looking for the man with power to be visible to his eye, and he goes to the king. The king threw him out. He said, "Get out of here. Do you want to get me killed? I do not have that kind of authority."

 

We have a lot of people in the Church today that will not throw you out. They say, "Come over here, and I will help you," and you sit there and you die in your church.

 

Finally, someone sent Naaman to Elijah. He went knocking on the door of this little man, living in a little hut, with no big signs saying, "Prophet of God, healings here, come and get your healing." No signs, no nothing, no visible indication that power was present upon him.

 

Someone had to tell Naaman where to go. He would never have been able to recognize the prophet of God by the way he looked or by the place where he lived, nor by his behavior, because Elijah was locked in the house. Nobody could see him. Naaman came, and he knocked on the door, and Elijah would not even go to the door. He sent his servant. Elijah knew who it was because he saw in the Spirit. He had communication from God. He knew who was coming to the house, and he knew what he wanted.

 

Apparently, Elijah had received instructions from God for this Syrian. He sent his servant to the door and said, "Tell the Syrian to go into the river Jordan and dip, dunk down seven times." Naaman was enraged. He was enraged. The prophet did not even come out to talk to me. He sent his servant. "He diagnosed me without even looking at me." Did anyone ever say to you, "How did you know that? How did you know that about me?"

 

Naaman was not going to do it. His pride got him so insulted, because he did not like the way the prophet dealt with him, and he almost lost his miracle. I want to tell you, brethren, that if you want a miracle from God, you had better get your pride on a leash, because God resists the proud. He will do it however He wants to do it, and He will frequently do it in a way that will offend your pride.

 

Brethren, you are not important. Nobody is important. None of us are important. We are all part of the scheme of things. Now God loves us. Do not misunderstand me. God loves us, and we are all important in that He loves us, but we are not so important that He is coming out to give us a fanfare or a king's greeting because He is not. He is the King, and we are suppose to come to Him, humbling ourselves.

 

A lot of people do not know that. He is God. He is all powerful. In His hands are life and death, deliverance or destruction. He loses nothing to give it to you. He has everything that we need, and we have a whole church full of people saying, "I am a king and a priest and He better give it to me." They have been taught wrong.

 

You come with your head bowed, brethren. If you want to get it, it is up to you. If you want it, come with your head bowed, saying "please," because He does not owe you a thing. When you come with your head bowed, saying please, it could take a while to get it too. He will answer you as slowly, or as quickly as He decides to do it.

 

All that I can say is everything He does is righteous. He is not mean or selfish. He is not hurtful, or trying to do you evil, or to wield His power over you to make you squirm. If He makes you wait, He has a reason, and His reason is righteous. We may not be able to understand it in our fallen condition, but His motive or His reasons are always, without exception, righteous.

 

Naaman did not want to go dunk in the river. He was really insulted. He came all the way from Syria, he went to the palace to see the king, and there was no healing for him there. Then someone sent him to the prophet, and this man lived in some little place where no one even knew about it, and he did not even come out to see him.

 

The Syrian servant said to him, "Well lord, are you not biting off your nose to spite your face? What harm is there in dunking seven times?" Naaman said, "We have rivers in Syria. I had to come all the way to Israel to dunk under the water seven times? Why could I not do it in Israel?" Simple! God said, "Do it in the Jordan," and He does not owe you an explanation.

 

Do you want to get healed? If you want to get healed, dunk in the Jordan. If you do not want to get healed, do not do it. It is your choice. I want to tell you this, and you have to understand that you are important to God. He loves us, but if you set your face against Him, He will let you go. If you do not want to dunk, if you are too proud to dunk seven times in the Jordan, go back to Syria, and dunk in the Syria river and see if you get healed. If you do not get healed, do not blame Him. "Why did you not do what I told you to?" It is because you are reprobate in your mind. There is something wrong with your mind. You have to see God as He is. He does not need you. He loves you, but He does not need you. You have to believe that.

 

"They teach it in the Church that God needs us. God is lonely." Did you hear that twist? Why did God create us? He is lonely. Give me a break!

 

He is the self-existed One. There is nothing or no one that He needs, least of all, man, who He clearly states in His Word is a worm. He is so high, that if we want to see a natural example of what we are in relationship to God, the Lord said, "Dig in the earth and turn it over, and you will see an earthworm." What an earthworm is to us, that is what we are to God, but He loves us and He wants to help us, and He wants to give us all things.

 

First, we have to get our attitude right. We do not know Him. Did anybody see that movie called, The Mouse Who Roared? It is an old movie. It was about this tiny little country in the middle of Europe somewhere, and they were bankrupt. They were trying to decide how they were going to survive. They decided to declare war on the United States, because they figured the United States does so well by everyone that they capture, that they would come out of their bankruptcy. That is what we are, bankrupt.

 

We are declaring war on God trying to steal His riches, but you cannot steal God's riches. He wants to give them to you, but you have to come with the right attitude. You cannot steal from God. You cannot steal from God, He will give it to you, but you have to ask for it. Do not make war on Him. Just say, "Please." That is all you have to do. Just say please. You cannot steal from God. Getting angry at God does not do you any good at all. I have tried it. It does not help.

 

We are talking about Naaman. He listened to his servant, and he went and he dunked in the river Jordan. Each time he came up. Leprosy gives you big white blotches on your skin. Every time he came up out of the water, the blotches were still there. Six times he came up out of the water, and his skin looked the same. He went down one more time, came up, and he was healed. He was healed of leprosy.

 

He took the victory over the pride in his own mind, and God gave it to him. The man was not even a Jew, and God healed him. In that day, in Israel, there were thousands of Jews that were sick that were not being healed. God goes and heals a heathen. Why were those Jews not being healed? Anybody know? True, it was pride, but even more than that, they did not have the faith. They did not have the faith. They really did not believe that God could do it.

 

Naaman heard it, and he believed that God could heal him. The Jews, right there in Israel, did not really believe it. We have a whole church full of people that do not really believe that God can heal them, that God can raise them from the dead, that God could change their life, that God could break the curses. They really do not believe it. As far as breaking curses are concerned, forget about it. They will fight with you unto death, telling you that all you have to do is say, "Repeat after me, I receive Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and every curse on your family line, back to ten generations is now broken." Go out and live your life, and if your life does not change, the reason is why? It is because you have no faith. That is what they are telling people. If someone like me goes to someone and says, "You have a curse on your life," they throw me out of the church. We have a Church that is in denial. We have a Church that is either powerless or has very little power, but that is about to change.

 

That which is hidden is about to come out into the light. What does that mean? It means that the world is now going to easily be able to locate the sons that have the power. Right now, I want to tell you, you cannot find someone with power in Christ today unless God directs you.

 

I heard a testimony not too long ago about a woman who was dying. I do not remember what her problem was. She could not get out of bed. She had been in bed for months, and the members of her church would come to her house and sleep on the floor around her bed just praying, praying, that God would heal her.

 

Many people came over a period of several months. It was at least months that she was sick, and getting worse, getting worse, getting worse. Finally, a man came into her life. You have to forgive me, because I cannot remember the details. A man came into her life with a word of knowledge and said, "There is a little man, who is not even a member of your church. (I think he was a Quaker.) He lives about twenty miles from here, but he has the gift of healing. Thus saith the Lord, if you rise up out of this bed and go to him, I will heal you."

 

All those people lying there on the floor praying for her, God did not use them. God wanted to use this little man that lived on this farm, twenty miles away. She got someone to take her. She could not walk. They had to carry her to the car and drove her to this man. He laid hands on her, and she was completely healed. She was completely healed.

 

What am I trying to tell you? This is what I am trying to tell you. If you really believe, if you really believe that God can heal you, and you are not trying to steal from God, but you are asking humbly with a right heart, if you just do not give up, He will send somebody to heal you. He is going to send who He wants, when He wants to send them, and He is going to do it one hundred percent in His own way if your heart is right towards Him, and you really believe He can do it.

 

All these people lying on the floor, believing, praying and praying, what was the result of it? The result of it was that God told this woman where she could get healed. He did not anoint the people close to her to heal her, but all of the prayers going up to heaven, resulted in information that sent her to someone who had this gift. You cannot find the people with power today unless God shows them to you.

 

Even the people with power, if God does not want to move through them, they cannot do it. No one can do anything for you. It has to be God's will even when it is a gift. I tell you all the time, I will pray for you anytime. I do not care what is wrong with you, I will pray for you anytime. If you get healed, do not give me the glory, but if you do not get healed, do not blame me. I am not the healer. He is the healer.

 

When somebody has something that you need, you have to humble yourself and ask. Demanding will get you nothing, and that is not just true with spiritual things. That is true throughout life. When somebody has something that you need, you have to ask nice. Do you not know that? Your mother was supposed to have told you that.

 

I do not even know how we got here. Anyway, we are about to see the power in the Church be made available to the public. It is hidden today, but it is coming out to the surface very soon. It is going to be so visible. It is going to be as visible as the Catholic Church on the street corner. The people that are genuinely looking for help are going to know where to go. They are not going to have to be praying for six months or six years for God to direct them to the right place.

 

I would like to share a little testimony with you that someone in Nigeria gave me, a really sweet guy. He was in college, and he said that he had been crying out to God for years, that He wanted to know God. He was going from church to church. He just knew that it was not right. I do not know what denomination he was. I do not remember. He was praying, and he did not even know what he was looking for. He just knew it was not right, and he went away to college and got involved with somebody that believed they could be healed.

 

I am sorry, but I do not remember the details. He wound up being assaulted by the Christians on campus. They were convinced that he was not of God. This person had some terrible disease, and he was believing God he could be healed.

 

He said that they actually set fire to his dormitory one night. He was severely persecuted for having faith in God. After praying for several years, he wound up in Benin City, which is one of the places that I preached in, and they have a home fellowship where they teach more mature doctrine. He had a whole big testimony.

 

He wound up going to college in Benin after being severely persecuted like this, just knowing in his heart that God had something for him, but he did not know what it was. He wound up choosing this university in Benin, and he did not know why because he had his choice of universities. Then God sent someone to him in the university, and he wound up being invited to this fellowship. This was over a period of time. He said the minute he walked into, what we would call a kingdom fellowship, and he heard the teaching, he knew that God had answered his prayer.

 

In this hour, everything is hidden. Sometimes you have to pray for a long period of time until God gets the people to you. Sometimes God sends people to you, and you do not understand that it is God, and you do not do what He tells you to do or you do not go because you cannot see in the spirit, and you do not really understand.

 

All of this is coming to an end, and the people who have power with God, they are going to be made obvious to the world. There is a Scripture that says when this happens, people are going to be coming from everywhere. They are going to be chaining themselves to your doorpost. That is what the Scripture says.

 

When it becomes obvious that there is help in a company of people, that there is help to heal your body, to deliver you from poverty, to break these curses on your life, when it becomes a known fact, there are going to be so many people coming, they are going to be chaining themselves to your doorstep, because they are going to recognize that there is power with God in you, and that it is not in word, but it is power, that is indeed power, to change their lives.

 

Several people have had dreams. I had this dream a long time ago. At the time, it was in the church that I was going to. The church was crowded, and everybody that could was praying for the people. It was so crowded that we were like in a subway train in rush hour. Everybody was exhausted. It never came to pass in that church, but I believe it was a true dream, and that church just typified the Church at large. I guess I started out with dreams this morning. Getting back to the dream that I had, I think it will probably come to pass down in Florida.

 

The dream that someone else had was that the building across the street was condemned, and everybody came over to us. What that is speaking about is the teaching in the Church today that is producing death. The teaching that is producing death is going to be condemned, and the people are, at least, going to have an opportunity to choose life.

 

What is happening in this hour is that the established Churches are exercising so much authority over the people that we have got a lot of people in these churches that are afraid to listen to somebody who disagrees with this priesthood.

 

The people are not getting helped, so that is what is going to be condemned. It is not necessarily the people, but that carnal mind that is producing that restraint that is stopping the people from getting God's help. God wants to help you. He wants to heal you. He wants your demons cast out. He wants your curses broken. He wants your life turning around. He wants you to start going forward and to live. That is what God wants for you, but you have to do it His way.

 

If you have got a curse, the curse has to be broken. You cannot get help by saying, "I do not have a curse." God says you have to confess the curse, and then the power of God moves to break it. You cannot deny that it is there. We have this priesthood all through the Church today in every denomination.

 

Either they do not know how to break the curse, or many of the churches in the Pentecostal denominations are saying that you cannot be cursed. "Israel cannot be cursed." There is a Scripture in the Bible that says that Israel cannot be cursed. Brethren, Israel cannot be cursed. That is true, but all of you, including me, are not Israel. Israel is the mind of Christ in us.

 

We also have a carnal mind and a body that is the image of Satan. Our body could be cursed. Our carnal soul can be cursed. Christ cannot be cursed, but your old man can be cursed. You have a new man and an old man. Right? It is the inner man and the outer man. Christ cannot be cursed, but your old man can be cursed. Your body can be cursed. What a manifestation of pride.

 

The people need deliverance from the priesthood. They are killing the people. They are killing the people. When God first sent me to a deliverance church fifteen years ago, people came out of the woodwork looking for me. I do not know where these people came from saying, "You should not go to that church, that is a bad church. It is all a lie, because a Christian cannot have a demon."

 

At the time I really did not know very much about anything. All I knew was that I was getting help there. I was only going a couple of months, and I just knew in my heart that there was hope for me there. In all honesty, I turned to the woman and said, "How do you explain that I am being helped there?" The only thing that she could tell me was, "I do not know, you would have to ask my Pastor." I said, "No thank you. If you do not know, that is enough for me." I got a lot of help there.

 

There is great destruction in the Church today. There is good and there is destruction, but mixture is anti-Christ. The hour is coming that the full power of God is going to be made available to whosoever wants it, to whosoever will, the Scripture says. God loves people. He loves everybody. He is no respecter of persons. He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him with humility.

 

We do have a problem in the Church today, but God is working on it, and His answer to that problem is to get a few people out and raise them up with the Spirit without measure. Then they are going to come out, and they are going to be made available to the whole world. This ministry of Christ, of healing and deliverance, is going to be made available to the whole world.

 

In this hour, it is not available to the whole world. The large percentage of the world does not even know it exists. It is going to be for everybody.

 

COMMENT: Naaman dipped seven times in the Jordan. Is that symbolic of us going through the full processings of the Lord to come to the place of sanctification that we are talking about?

 

PASTOR VITALE: I do not know.

 

COMMENT: I have another question. I was listening to one of your tapes today. You talked about Lazarus being raised from the dead, and that people came from all over to see him because he was raised in maturity, in full stature. How can that be? He died.

 

PASTOR VITALE: Paul was in full stature and he died too.

 

COMMENT: Just for the sake of being raised, he was in full stature or was he in full stature when he died?

 

PASTOR VITALE: I do not know the answer to that question, but once you are raised to full stature, you are in full stature.

 

Let me try and explain it to you. You are not fully born again until you are glorified, until the third stage of the resurrection. Paul said that he was born out of season. That meant that for whatever God's purposes, He can do anything He wants. I tell you all the time, God is sovereign. He can break any rule He wants to break.

 

There is a season in which men will be raised to full stature. We are expecting it, just like we are waiting for spring to come here with snow still on the ground. We are waiting to enter into that season. It is going to happen at any moment, but to the best of my knowledge, we have not entered in yet.

 

What is the sign that we have entered in? At least one man is going to stand up in full stature. I do not know of anybody, so to the best of my knowledge, it has not happened yet, although I expect it at any moment. God broke His own rule, and He raised up Paul into full stature. I believe Lazarus was in full stature and possibly John, but I am not sure. They were born out of season.

 

God broke His own rule for His own purposes. That means, even though He raised them to the first stage of resurrection, they never continued on to the second and third stages of resurrection.

 

You might liken it to a woman who was pregnant, carrying into the first or second trimester and losing the child. It never came to full birth, because God had a purpose for them to appear in the first stage of the resurrection, but they could not enter beyond that because God decided to obey His own plan.

 

The plan for all of humanity to enter into full spiritual birth was that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, would be crucified, raised from the dead, glorified and pour out of His Spirit which is in heaven, on the hearts of all men and reproduce the nature of Christ in the individual.

 

There was no way that could have happened for Lazarus, because Jesus had not been crucified, and He had not returned to the earth yet in seed form. The plan was that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, would give up His identity as Jesus of Nazareth and become a spiritual seed. He would change form, that the matter of His body and His soul would be transmuted into spiritual seed so that the whole of humanity could be seeded with His life. That was the plan.

 

There was no way that Paul and John and Lazarus could have gone on to the second and third stage of resurrection in the condition they were in. You might say, if you want to, if it helps you, it was an imputed full stature. It is just like we have the gifts and the calling of God imputed, but then you wait for the fullness to come which is in Christ. It was in the form of a gift, but it could only go so far. It could not go all the way. Did you understand what I said?

 

COMMENT: For the sons of God, full stature means that their body will not die? Do I understand that?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Since I do not have all the answers, let me put it this way. I would rather not be explicit than tell you something that is not true. Full stature means that their human spirit is raised from the dead. Once our human spirit is raised from the dead, it means that your body comes into a condition where it is not necessary for it to die, where your spirit which is raised from the dead is powerful enough to preserve this flesh for as long as the Father allows.

 

We know that Jesus was in full stature, and the Lord required Him to give up His flesh. We know that Paul was in full stature, and the Lord required him to give up his flesh. Also Lazarus, and if John was, indeed, in full stature, the same thing. All that I could tell you is, once we are raised to full stature, our body will not die because of corruption. Our body rots because our mind is death.

 

Whether or not the Father will require some people to give up their body, at this point I honestly do not know. I do not see anything indicating that, but I do not know what God's plan is. What I see after that, what I see coming in the near future is the seed of Christ coming to full fruition in a company of people. That means their human spirit will be touched by that seed of Jesus Christ, and that seed will raise their human spirit from the dead. That is what we call full stature. It will quicken their soul. It will give life to their soul.

 

Our soul today is dead, because the soul that sins dies. We have a soul, but it is a dead soul which has existence, but the seed of Christ will preserve our body. We expect this to happen real soon to a small group of people. Once it happens to them, these people will go out and minister to the other human beings on the face of the earth. Each man in his own order, and we expect to see this soon. 

 

We expect to see this resurrection of the dead, this being made alive of their soul and the preservation of their body happening, eventually, to every human being on the face of the earth. My understanding right now, which could very well be an imperfect understanding, is the revelation I am walking in, that this ministry is going out to every human being on the face of the earth.

 

There will be some people whose bodies will die while this ministry is going out to the trillions of people. People will also be dying, but we will reach a place in the history of humanity that this ministry of life will get to everybody that is on the face of the earth. The few people that it did not touch will die off and, eventually, everybody on the face of the earth will be in this condition where their human spirit has been raised from the dead, and that spirit has quickened their soul and preserved their body. I believe this is going to take fifteen hundred years.

 

The scripture that I base it upon is in the Old Testament. It is also in the book of Revelation. There is a lot of talk about three and a half days. We know, that to God, one day is as a thousand years to man.

 

The book of Revelation is a symbolic book. I believe what God is saying is three thousand, five hundred years. It has already been two thousand years since these events have come to pass in the man, Jesus of Nazareth. I will tell you what I expect approximately, and if God tells me I am wrong, I will tell you.

 

It has taken two thousand years from the time the man, Jesus of Nazareth, was transmuted into a spiritual seed that was capable of pouring out upon all mankind. It has taken two thousand years from that time to get to the point where we see the second generation of Christ appearing, where we see a company of men having the same experience that Jesus of Nazareth had. It is about to happen at any moment. It has taken two thousand years, and it is my understanding that it will take another fifteen hundred years for this experience to spread to all of humanity.

 

At that time, when every human being on the face of the earth is in full stature, the whole creation together is being glorified, because glorification is likened to atomic fusion. Do you know what fusion is? It is like soldering something. We are all being joined together. We are all being melted into one. We were individuals, and we are becoming one. One person cannot be glorified at a time before the whole creation. The glorification is the joining together or the reconciling of all things.

 

My current belief is, before we can go on to that step, everyone on the face of the earth has to be in full stature. Those of us that ascend to full stature first have to wait for the others to come, and then we are all going the last leg together. That is how I see it right now. We will ascend to full stature one at a time. We will ascend to the second stage of the resurrection, which is the circumcision of our carnal mind. That will happen individually also.

 

Once we get to that point, we have to wait to go up as a group. We receive the Holy Ghost on an individual basis, and we are having a salvation experience, being reconciled to God one at a time. It is all individual up until that last step, and then we all go up together. That is how I see it right now. It is a lot better than the way it is being preached in some circles.

 

I have had several people come to me in Nigeria. One woman, in particular, was a pretty carnal woman, who knew that she was carnal. That is why hearing this false doctrine was really upsetting her.

 

What is being preached is that the first fruits company can be likened to the first wine that you get from the grapes or the first pressing of the olives, the first fruits of the quality. The second crop to come up is not such a high quality. The third crop will be the servants to the first fruits. There is a whole teaching like that coming forth. I guess it is here in the United States too.

 

This woman was very distressed. Her husband was very anointed, but she was carnal and very distressed by this teaching. At the time that she asked me the question, I did not realize that there was someone right there in Nigeria preaching it. I really did not know that. When I gave her this answer, she was very, very relieved. There is no such thing as a cast system in heaven. That is from the demonic minds of men where some men put other men underneath them and put categories on men. God does not do that. Christ is the great equalizer. He is the great equalizer.

 

I shall never forget a day about two years ago when God said to me, "Did you ever wonder how I could say that there is no male or female in Christ Jesus, there is no bond or free, there is no Jew or Greek?"

 

Galatians 3:28 says everybody is the same in Christ. Did you ever wonder how that could be, because all you have to do is look around the Church, and it is obvious that people are not equal. Some people have money, some people are poor, some people have PhD's, and other people are not smart enough to even go to college at all. People just are not equal. It is just not true.

 

The Lord said to me, "Did you ever wonder how I could write that Scripture?" Then He told me that when Christ is really formed in you, you will be Christ. That mentally retarded girl in our ministry will be Christ. She is going to have the mind of a genius, no different than me when the work is done. Before the work can be done, you have to enter into the season where God is doing it. It has not started yet. Then it has to happen to you.

 

Do not tell me you are a son of God, and do not give me any of this junk that is being preached because it is just junk. You cannot get in there by mind control. It has to happen to you. It is just junk that is being preached out there, and it hurts other people. It hurts them bad.

 

In this hour, God is starting with a small group. He is not a respecter of persons. He does not love you more than He loves someone else. He does not love me more than He loves you, but for whatever His purposes, it is Scripturally consistent, if you are a student of the Bible, that He works with small groups. When He saves that small group first, they do not run away and live the "life of Riley" or the good life.

 

When God pulls you out of the mud puddle, He cleans you up and what does He do with you? He sends you back to get the others out. If you come across a preacher that is telling you that God pulled him out of the mud puddle, and now he is lauding it over you, you had better run and get yourself another preacher. The true ministers of Christ are servants to the afflicted. They are ministers to the afflicted of this world.

 

That does not mean that you could walk all over them. That does not mean they have to give you every dollar that they have and empty out all their house and give you all their possessions. That is not what I am talking about. They are ministering Christ to you. They are not taking it for themselves. They are not running off and saying, "I got it and it is tough on you."

 

It looks to the carnal mind that God may look like a respecter of persons, but He is not. He has got a plan, and He has picked a few people for whatever purposes He has picked them, and He is raising them up so that He can send them back to you. When He cleans you up, He is going to send you back, too. He has not healed you, He has not delivered you, He has not picked you up off your face so that you can go on with your life and not do anything for anybody else.

 

He is not a man, He is God. Men do things like that. They pick themselves up and make it out of the ghetto, and they forget about everybody back there, but God does not do that. Anybody got something to say?

 

COMMENT: What stage is it when the Lord said to Peter, "When thou art converted"?

 

PASTOR VITALE: I have not looked it up, but I will give you an educated guess. It does not even have to mean full stature. I believe that anyone who is walking in victory in Christ, because the Lord has picked them up off their face and given them His strength that, that is His commandment to them, to strengthen the ones who are weaker than you. You do not have to be in full stature to do that.

 

What it means is that Christ has come into your life in enough of a measure that you are no longer being destroyed, but you are standing in enough strength to help other people. You do not even have to be in full stature.

 

COMMENT: I was just thinking what a beautiful sight it will be, men all over the earth standing up in full stature, walking and doing what Christ did.

 

PASTOR VITALE: There is going to be a stage in between that. There is going to be intense spiritual warfare of the minds. It will be intense. I believe we are about to see people stand up in ungodly spiritual power in this country, like unto what is found in Africa. There is going to be a lot of very shocked people around. They can love God. It is very nice that you say you love God, but for whatever reason you have not matured spiritually. They really are going to be knocked right out.

 

Exactly what is going to happen to them, I do not know, but I do know that it is going to be too late to get this development in you. The Scripture is the parable of the ten virgins. You cannot be spiritually matured by going up on a prayer line and getting slain in the spirit. You cannot be spiritually matured by having some carnal preacher pour a bottle of olive oil on you.

 

I saw a preacher pour a whole bottle of olive oil, and he did not just touch it on his finger. He poured the whole bottle of olive oil over their head. Brethren, the oil that you need to be anointed with is the oil of Christ, not some carnal physical olive oil. There is no power in olive oil. You might as well pour a cup of coffee over their head. This is the truth.

 

When are they going to grow up? When are we going to grow up? I believe that the day is coming, and it is coming very soon, that a lot of people will be maturing in Satan. We know they are practicing witchcraft here on Long Island. There are covens and Satanic churches and New Agers right here. There are going to be people standing up who are spiritually mature in the spirit of Satan. They are going to be going out and doing their thing.

 

I cannot tell you exactly how it is going to happen, but if you are a Christian, you are going to be in trouble if you do not have that spiritually-developed Christ in you. You may be as faithful as you know how to be. You may love God and go to church four nights a week and read through the Bible once a year for the last twenty years. You may feed the poor, go to the prison ministry, do all of those carnal works, but if you have not entered into a program of spiritual works that have built Christ in you, you are going to be knocked out by these people walking around with a spiritually-developed carnal mind.

 

That, to me, is the definition of the five virgins without oil. It is faithless to be lovely, wonderful people doing all the good carnal works, but Christ never grew up in them. They are virgins that were typifying their faithfulness to God. The term virgin in the Scripture is referring to fornication of the mind. They are not going to be fornicating with the carnal mind. In their thoughts they are going to be faithful to Christ, but they are not going to have any oil. When they see those guys walking down the street they will whip them up just like in the movies. Remember the movie "Carrie?" Do you remember "Star Trek?" The rays come out of their eyes. It is going to be happening. It is going to be too late.

 

The Scripture says that the virgins went to get the oil. The Scripture does not say that God did not give them the oil, or that they could not get the oil. What the Scripture says is that they went to get the oil, so the training process was still available to them, but by the time they got it, what happened? The door was closed.

 

There is going to be an opening of the door. An opening into what? An opening into spiritual power. There is going to be a time period where human beings are going to be permitted to enter into spiritual power. You have to get in when the door opens, because the door is only going to stay open for a season, and it is going to close. They went to get their oil. They went for the training. It is going to be available.

 

The teachings, and the spiritual experiences that produce an internalized Christ will be available, but it is going to take a time period to develop in them. By the time Christ appears in them, the door to the realm of the Spirit will be closed.

 

COMMENT: Is that what it means in Revelation where Jesus says, "I stand at the door and knock? Open to me and I will come in unto you."

 

PASTOR VITALE: These kinds of questions I have to stop and think about them. I really do not want to answer you off the top of my head.

 

It is going to happen. Raw spiritual power is about to manifest in this country, raw unrestrained Satanic spiritual power.

 

COMMENT: When this takes place, will we have the power and authority if, for instance, some Crack addict comes at us, as Jesus had when the demoniac came at Him?

 

PASTOR VITALE: I do not know exactly how we are going to deal with them, but I believe that it will be simultaneous, that whoever God has called to enter into this experience will enter in, in time to deal with this other power. I believe that. Exactly how it is going to manifest, or what we are going to do to them, whether we are going to knock them down, and they are going to get converted or what, I do not know. Whether it is going to be outright warfare with people getting killed, I do not know.

 

I do know this, that the word in my heart that I have been preaching here for a few years is that when you tangle with a son, you get saved. That is the word that is in my heart right now. I have seen it in my life. Of course, in a lesser level. If you try to hurt someone that is doing everything they can to serve God, judgment falls on you, but that judgment results in conviction of sin and repentance, and you wind up being reconciled unto God. I would expect the Scripture to be consistent.

 

I told you about that witch that tried to kill me. You all heard that testimony. He cut my lifeline with his finger. He grabbed my arm. I did not see him coming. He just grabbed my arm. That is what they do in witchcraft. He just sliced my lifeline with his finger. If you have the spiritual power when you do it, the person dies. I cried for about an hour and a half and then I decided that I was not going to cry anymore. I very boldly said, "Lord, if you let him kill me, I am dead. This is ridiculous. I am not going to cry. I did not die."

 

About three years after that, I asked the Lord, "What ever happened to that man? I am curious. What did you do to him? Did you send the curse back on him. Is he dead? I am just trying to understand how you think." The Lord took me to a church in Brooklyn. I was on an evangelistic trip in a church in Brooklyn, and the guy was there praising God. I walked down the aisle, and sometimes I do not recognize people easily. I am not sharp in that way. I do not remember cars or things like that. I just walked down the aisle of this church, and I looked at him and said, "Wow, that looks like that man.

 

I just stopped dead in my tracks. I was standing there with my mouth open, because I thought it was him. He turned around, and he saw me and he looked at me and started to smile. He recognized me. I just knew it was him. I do not even know his name, but God saved him.

 

I would like to believe that my present understanding of the Scripture is true, that when the sons of God tangle with these people who move in high spiritual power, that the end of it will be that they will be converted. I would expect that, but you never know what God is going to do. He looks at the heart of a man. You cannot tell when you look at the external appearance of somebody what God is going to do. To someone with a Pharisaical mind, they would be very angry that God reconciled that man to Him that tried to kill me.

 

They want to see them punished. They want to see them burn in hell for at least two eternities. People are like that. I want the mind of Christ. I pray frequently to the Lord, saying Lord, "What do you think about that? How did you see that? What is your evaluation? Give me your mind in this issue," especially if I am getting mad at somebody, or I am hurt and feel this negativity coming up in me.

 

I say, "Lord, give me your mind. Maybe I am looking at it wrong. Maybe they did not mean it that way. Maybe I am taking the whole thing wrong. How do you see this thing?" Usually, it just goes away because God does not get mad. It is not that kind of anger. Those thoughts are not of God. I want to think with His thoughts.

 

COMMENT: I am just thinking, that as a young Catholic child, I believed in this Purgatory and Limbo and Hell. I was always praying the rosary and ejaculations for anybody who would be in this place called Purgatory. God forbid they should go to this place called Hell. I was wrestling with God to try and grab them out of the fire, because I thought that was something that was so horrible.

 

PASTOR VITALE: I passed a man lying on the street with hundreds of people walking around in midday in Manhattan. He was completely out of it, groaning and moaning. As far as he was concerned no one could have been around. He was in his own little world of torment. People are in various degrees of that, as I have explained to you, depending on the blessings. It is a balancing out of the blessings and the curses that you are born with.

 

To see somebody rolling on the floor in such agony, not aware of anybody being around him, you have to have heavy curses and a minimum of blessings on your life to be in that bad of a shape. The heavier the curse, the longer it takes for God to clean you up, because they have been on your family line for generations.

 

This is what is happening in this country today as we pull back from Christianity. We are going to start seeing some really heavy duty problems over the next generation.

 

I was amazed when God showed me, not too long ago, the extent to which He was protecting this nation when we were a nation of people that just went to church on Sunday. I am not talking about the kind of dedication that we experienced in that other church where people went four nights a week casting out demons. I am not talking about that. I am talking about the average guy, like the way you were raised, who just went to the Methodist Church every Sunday, and slept through the service a couple of times. We were a nation of church going people.

 

Even people going to the Catholic Church, if they were really praying to Jesus, how do I know He did not hear their prayers? I cannot tell you He did not hear their prayers. We were a nation of Sunday church goers, and His hand was heavy on this nation. I see us coming out from under the basic morality that coexisted with that Sunday church going where His laws were being honored. His laws were legislated, honored, and were taught in the homes.

 

I am a prophet and I usually see years into the future. I see this nation tumbling downward to such a terrible degree. Sometimes all I could do is hang my head when I see what is happening as we undo certain legislation, and we justify acts that are forbidden by the Bible. I see it.

 

We are just going down, and the children that are going to be born in the next generation and the generation after that, are going to have problems that we cannot even imagine yet. It is going to be really severe, because all of this stuff is inherited. It really comes down on the fourth generation. From the fourth generation on, it really comes down hard.

 

If we think we have problems now with AIDS and whatever else, it is going to become a very overwhelming problem. It is not just AIDS, it is going to be all kinds of diseases and problems. Right now, I hear there are so many illegitimate children, that they do not have enough foster homes to take care of them. They have no place to put the kids. They are talking about building orphanages again.

 

It is just going to be very difficult unless God sovereignly moves, unless the sons of God stand up, and there is a big turn around here. We are going right down, morally, on moral grounds, we are going down.

 

Let us believe God, that the sons of God are going to stand up. I do believe that He is going to intervene. I believe that we are a Christian nation. I believe that this nation was founded in Christ, and that it was dedicated to Christ when it was born. I believe that everything that is dedicated unto Christ can fall away for a season, but when it is dedicated unto Him, it is His and He will bring us out of it, but He will bring us out of it with severe judgment.

 

He is not going to bring us out of it by being nice to us. We are going to be severely chastened, and it has already started, but I believe that He will restore us because we are His. That is my Scriptural basis for saying that. This nation was dedicated to Him at its birth, and the Scripture says that if you train up a child in the right way, when he is old, he will not depart from God's law, so we have got to come back, but it is going to be something to see.

 

It is going to be something to see. There will be gnashing and wailing of teeth. There are many suffering today. We are a compulsive nation.

 

All of the self-help groups all over the country, for everything that you could imagine, not just alcoholism and drug addiction, co-dependent, eating disorders, shopping disorder, sex addiction, everything. Self help groups that I have never even heard of, all over the country, compulsive disorder everywhere, depression, mental illness, diseases that cause your body to be mutilated. We are under siege. The whole nation is under siege. We are destroying our own children. Families breaking apart, rebellion everywhere, and rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.

 

The whole point is that as the whole nation goes crazy and comes out from under God's law, the curses of God are implemented. Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. It calls for heavy judgment from God. Witchcraft calls down heavy judgment from God. What am I talking about? Look at Somalia. Look at the famines that have been over there in Africa. Millions of people are starving to death.

 

The Christian nations are sending them food and help. What is going to happen when it happens to us? Because we are ignorant and do not realize that the reason we have everything we have over here, and Africa does not have it, is because we had Christianity and they were steeped in witchcraft. For whatever reason, that was the way it was.

 

It is not that one group is better than the other group. It is that the Christians are blessed, those that are practicing witchcraft are cursed, and we are starting to practice witchcraft over here. It has nothing to do with your national heritage. It has nothing to do with your color. It has to do with spiritual things. Do you know what is happening? They are having a big Christian revival in Nigeria. It is coming up as a Christian nation, while we are going back down into witchcraft and hedonism.

 

You watch this thing manifest. Did you hear what I just said? You watch this thing manifest. There are going to be some mad people around. The blessing is on the Christian. The curse is on the worker of witchcraft. It has nothing to do with anything else. We are all out of the same seed, which is one plant. We are all one living soul. It is like saying your blood cells are blessed, and your heart cells are cursed. It is going to be something to see.

 

COMMENT: Is there a particular curse associated with idolatry?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Oh yes, idolatry is the worst sin. Actually, there are three really bad sins. I cannot say idolatry is worst than them. Pride, idolatry, and witchcraft are the three worst sins in the Bible. Idolatry and pride are really the same sin, because idolatry is worship of self, even if you set a little idol up in front of you. Spiritually speaking, if you have the understanding of it, it is worship of self, so idolatry and pride are just different sides of the same problem. Idolatry is an abomination before the Lord. It is the worst thing you could do.

 

COMMENT: What is the curse associated with idolatry?

 

PASTOR VITALE: It is utter destruction. Idolatry is not just an idol. Idolatry is putting anything before God. This whole creation puts everything before God, even the people that call themselves Christians. It is very rare that you do not put something before God.

 

I mean, if God told you to take your son and put him on the altar to sacrifice him, do you really think you could do it? Abraham was going to do it. Do you really think you could do it? I do not think I could do it, so we are all guilty of idolatry. The ultimate idol is our own carnal mind. We are all guilty of idolatry. We are all guilty of everything. That is the whole point. You get some Pharisee in the Church saying, "I never did this sin, and you did that sin." We are all guilty of everything. Our soul is fallen. Even if we never did the act, we have the potential for it in our fallen soul. We are all guilty of everything.

 

I want to clarify something here, because it is not true that all sins are equal. We are all guilty of everything, but you come into a different realm when you do it. You come into a different realm when you do it.

 

When you do it, you are going to reap what you sow. What am I talking about? I am talking about any sin, adultery, idolatry, any sin. Once you practice it, you will reap what you sow. If you restrain yourself, if you resist and you do not practice it, you are not going to reap what you sow, but as far as entering into the kingdom is concerned, you still have a soul that is guilty of that sin. Do you understand what I am saying?

 

Jesus said, "Some people will receive few stripes, and others will receive many stripes." If you act out the sin, you will receive stripes in accordance with what you did, if we are all thieves or if we are all murderers. The whole human race is a murderer.

 

Our ancestor was a murderer from the beginning. That is what the Bible says. Our father was a murderer from the beginning. We are all guilty of murder in the realm of the spirit, but if you are one who actually commits a murder, you will get many stripes, and the one who did not act it out will get few stripes in that area.

 

This is a confusion in the Church. Someone said to me not too long ago, "If I lie, my sin is as serious as that guy who murdered somebody." No, that is not true.

 

That is not true that if you tell a lie, that you are going to get the same recompense as the person who murdered somebody. That is not true. We will get stripes, the Scriptural word, or we will get difficult situations in accordance with our behavior. We will get recompensed in accordance with our behavior. It pays to do good works and to restrain yourself from doing evil works, because you will reap what you have sowed on that level, on the behavioral level.

 

On the spiritual level, every human being alive is fallen, and in our fallen minds we are considered guilty of every crime in the Bible. Those whole passages, fornicators and murderers and criminals and homosexuals will not enter into the kingdom of God. We are all of those things in our fallen souls, and we cannot get into the kingdom of God while we are in that condition. That is why we have to get a new mind, because all of these crimes exist in the way we think.

 

When we get a new mind, and our mind is Christ, we will not be guilty of these crimes anymore. That is a different level. That is not the behavioral level. That is the spiritual level, two different levels. There is no sin that is not forgivable by God.

 

When they say there is one sin, the unforgivable sin, if you blaspheme the Holy Ghost, you shall not enter in, in this age or the next age. What that sin is, the one sin that can keep you out of the kingdom is pride. What that means is if you blaspheme the Holy Ghost. What is the Holy Ghost? The Holy Ghost is the seed of the Glorified Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

 

He is the seed that is coming to contact your human spirit and raise it from the dead. If you blaspheme Him, if you deny Him, if you speak evil of Him, what is going to happen with this attitude of your mind? You are going to keep Him from entering into your mind. If He does not enter in, He cannot raise you from the dead.

 

God is not vindictive. The mind of man is vindictive. They say if you blaspheme the Holy Ghost, you are going to be lost. That is not it. If this pink tissue has the power to raise you from the dead, and every time I walk up to you with this pink tissue, you burn it, how are you going to be raised from the dead? You have to open yourself to it. You have to receive Him when He comes for you. When He comes towards you, you have to receive Him.

 

If your mind is in a condition that turns Him away, you are being self-destructive to yourself. That is what that Scripture means. It is not a vindictive punishment of the Lord.

 

Although it is not clear in that scripture, I still believe from other scriptures that if God desires to save you, despite you blaspheming this pink tissue, He can do it, and the way He will do it is that He will knock you down. He will give you hard times. He will give you painful experiences so the next time He comes to you with this pink tissue, you say, "Thank God that you are back."

 

You have to understand the overall mind set of God. God is not vindictive. He is righteous. He is righteous, but He is not vindictive. My Bible says that He always makes a way of escape, even if you blaspheme the Holy Ghost. Maybe you blasphemed the Holy Ghost twenty years ago, and maybe you blasphemed the Holy Ghost ten years ago, and maybe you blasphemed the Holy Ghost last year, but God has broken your back with painful experiences, both physically and mentally, and this year He is coming to you again.

 

Guess what? You are going to say, "Welcome." He is faithful. He loves you, but He is righteous. What does that mean? When I say to you that He is righteous, what that means is that you must come to Him in a right mind set.

 

You see a natural example in the world, whether it is your father or whether it is your employer, whenever someone has a true authority over you. I said it earlier, if you want something from somebody, you have to humble yourself.

 

You do not go up to somebody who has authority over you. You do not go up to your boss and say, "Look buddy, you had better put twenty-five dollars a week more in my paycheck next week." You will be without a job. It is unrighteous to do that, and I know it is unrighteous, because the fruit of your behavior is that you got fired.

 

If you are living in somebody's house and they have house rules, and you go up to them and try to take authority over them, you are going to get put out of the house. If you do not get put out of the house, the person in charge is not a righteous person if they let you do that to them.

 

God is righteous. You must come to Him in a right attitude, or He will boot you out and let you suffer until you come into a right attitude. You cannot steal from God. You cannot demand from God. You cannot tell God how to run His Kingdom. You must come to God knowing that He has the authority. He is the King, and you are the servant. He has power, and you are powerless. He has all the wealth, all the riches, spiritual and physical in the universe, and you are needy.

 

He is self-sufficient. He is self-sustaining. He needs nothing. We are weak, we are needy. He has and we need.

 

When you understand that, then you have come into an attitude of mind where He can bless you. He is not going to bless you when you are taking authority over Him. No one who is exercising a Godly authority is going to bless you when you are trying to take authority over them. They are not going to do it. They are going to throw you out. That does not mean that they will not take you back the next day, but for that encounter they are going to throw you out.

 

It is ungodly to try to take authority over someone that has authority over you. You have to learn your place. Everybody has a place. It is not an insult to say to you, "learn your place." If you are in the army, and you know you are standing in front of the General, you are suppose to know your place. You are suppose to know your place. You can wind up in jail. In the army jail they would lock you up and throw the key away. You do not even get a trial. You do not go over to the General and bad mouth him. You have to learn your place.

 

We have a whole community of people in this world that do not know their place. They are continuously having problems. They have problems on their job. They have problems in their personal relationships. They have problems in school. They have continual problems, because they do not know how to relate to people that have authority over them.

 

Most of the time they do not even know what they are doing wrong. Their childhood was incomplete. They were never taught how to relate to different levels of authority, and thus get what they need from these authorities. They were either never taught, or they were taught incorrectly. They have trouble everywhere they go.

 

Brethren, if you have trouble everywhere you go and this is going on for years, you had better sit down and take stock of yourself and ask yourself if there is not something wrong with your attitude.

 

See if there is something wrong with the way you relate to people. Is it possible that you are disrespectful? Is it possible that you are stepping on their spiritual toes? Maybe you do not know about it. Maybe you are offensive. Maybe you are overly aggressive. Maybe you are crossing over into their spiritual space. Maybe you are gossiping. Maybe you are looking for information that you are not entitled to. Maybe you are offending them.

 

COMMENT: I was watching some television programs. One man was a serial killer, and he was talking about the depths of hell and about the evil within him. He said things that really got my attention. Another man talked about the dark side that he had. They were aware of these things, and it is becoming common knowledge even in the writings of the secular magazines. You hear the writers talk about the demon within a person tormenting them. Years ago you never heard of that. Never. They never spoke about those things.

 

PASTOR VITALE: I think you heard about it in Christian circles. You did not hear about it in secular circles. I think they have known this in Christian circles for many years, but not the psychologists or the writers. We have not seen anything yet.

 

COMMENT: To your knowledge, how many demons spirits does the Bible speak of?

 

PASTOR VITALE: The largest amount, to the best of my knowledge, that the Bible relates being in one man is six thousand. The Bible calls it a legion of demons, six thousand or more demons. I do not think that it is advisable to think in those terms. I could be wrong, but what it sounds like to me is that you are worried that it is okay to have two demons, but it is not okay to have six thousand demons. That is just a manifestation of pride.

 

It is like saying, "I have cancer in my little finger, and that it is not too bad, but when the cancer gets into my lungs, then I really am going to worry." It really does not make any difference. We all have a problem, the whole human race has a problem. We are all fallen. We all have a few, and it really does not matter. The person that has two or three demons, if he is bound with pride, could be in a much more worse condition than someone who has six thousand demons, but who is open to the delivering power of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

That person with the six thousand demons, however long it takes to get them out, can be shooting way ahead of the guy with the two or three demons, who is so bound by pride that he is not growing. Numbers really do not matter. It is not the best way to think. It is no more of a shame than having a physical disease. That is just the truth.

 

COMMENT: Then, of course, there is always the ones birthing their own demons by agreeing with their carnal minds. All I can say is how the Lord explained it to me. When we are angry about something in our carnal mind, and we agree with it, we birth a demon of bitterness within ourselves. In other words, if I have an argument with somebody, I have to immediately forgive them and ask the Lord to bless them instead of allowing the bitterness to grow in me, because it will take root and form a demon in me. In essence I would be birthing a demon of bitterness. That is how we birth some of the demons by our own actions.

 

PASTOR VITALE: Do you know what that is saying? I will explain it to you. That is talking about the origin of demons and where they come from. What is being said is that they do not come from the outside and get inside of us. They are born in our heart. They are the fruit of ungodly thoughts. The more ungodly your thoughts are, the more likely you are to have demons. The more you are filled with unforgiveness, and bitterness, and repressed anger, the more likely you are to have demons or many demons. That does not matter how many. They have to come out, if you have one or six thousand. They do not come out until you confess that your thinking is wrong and turn around.

 

COMMENT: Would you say that what is happening in Somalia for years is demon possessed men? The fighting, the food, the whole thing, what kind of demon spirits are making people starve and gangs fighting one another for control? What demon would have enough power to make a baby's stomach blow up like that with gas, starvation and things of that nature? There is so much anger and frustration and questions of why. Why?

 

PASTOR VITALE: This is a very hard word, but a demon spirit did not do that. God did that. It is a judgment for the practice of witchcraft and idolatry. It is all in the Bible. We touched on it last week. The judgments of God are covering over all of Africa because of their idolatry and their witchcraft. That is the judgments of God taken to a very severe extreme. There was no repentance. That is a hard word, but it is true.

 

That is exactly what happens to you when you turn away from God, or when God is not present in your life. The whole world is under the wrath of God. We are reaping what our ancestors sowed. Ever since the creation fell, creation came under the wrath of God. We are reaping what our original ancestor Adam, sowed. Then again, Cain fell and Abel died, and then Noah fell.

 

The whole creation is under the wrath of God. The whole world is under the wrath of God, but the nations who are under Christ have that wrath modified and the edge taken off of it, because we are down here in hell, but we are trying to obey the law of God.

 

For the nations that did not have an opportunity to obey the word of God, or have not heard it, or have rejected it, that is what it is like out there in the part of hell where God is not present. It is a very hard word, but it is the truth. I am just trying to make that clear.

 

We were put out of the Garden because of sin, but it is not forever. It is until God gets us back. What most men have a lot of trouble dealing with is how long it is taking God to get us back. It has been taking a long time. The carnal minds of men have a problem with that. I would just like to exhort you to be very careful not to pronounce God unrighteous. I know it is very hard for me to understand how God could let all this happen. I just know that He is righteous, and my mind is fallen.

 

If you are taking this information and you are blaming God, you are guilty of the sin of pride. I just want to encourage you to not do that even though it is hard for us to understand that God could allow that to happen, and that He is working very hard to get us out of hell. He is working very hard, and the time is upon us. He is doing it. It is our sin. We are down here, and the people in Somalia, the people of the world, we are suffering because of our ancestor's sin.

 

God did not do this to us for no reason. These are judgments which are the outgrowth of sin. God is the hero who is doing everything He can to get us out, and He will shortly get us out. We are the guilty ones, and God is the hero.

 

Keep your thoughts straight, because if your thoughts get mixed up and you start calling God evil, what you are doing is blaspheming the Holy Ghost. What you are doing is cutting off the help of God to you by saying it. This is all through the church today. I am not talking about any one church in particular. This is going on all through the church today and all through the world. People are saying, "We are innocent, and we did not deserve this judgment."

 

"Somalia could not have deserved that judgment, therefore God allowed it and God is a wicked God." Those are the thoughts of your carnal mind. Everything that happens to every human being happened because they deserved it. God is a righteous God and His provision, the way of escape that He has made for us is to give us a new heart that will stop us from doing things that are bringing this judgment upon us.

 

God's deliverance for us is to kill this wicked mind that keeps thinking all these wicked thoughts and doing all these wicked things that is bringing the judgments of God down on us. He is giving us a new mind. He is giving us His mind. He sacrificed His Son for us, and He is joining His Son to our heart for the life of the ages so that we will have what it takes to stop sinning.

 

This judgment and this torment that you see in Somalia and the rest of the world, it is not going to lift off the human race until we stop sinning. It is impossible for us to stop sinning, but with God all things are possible. When He gives you His mind and joins His mind to your sinning mind, you will stop sinning. Do you understand what I said?

 

COMMENT: It is so obvious that utter destruction is when we are left to our own ways. Thank God it is not forever.

 

PASTOR VITALE: It is sort of like I was explaining to you last night. We walked out from underneath God's protection. Outside of that umbrella of God's protection is hell. We are out here. God has to get us back in.

 

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