COMMENT: It is a blessing. I just wanted to make that comment. Your messages are very deep. When I started to listen to it, even though I have heard it before on other messages, the understanding is just starting to come to me.
PASTOR VITALE: Thank you for telling me. The Lord is telling me that I have to keep saying it over and over again. I remind you that I am certainly not perfect, I have a lot to learn, and I am being trained in my area. As I was saying, if sometimes I do get short with you, please forgive me. Do not let it put you off, if I have a moment where I get short with you. Sometimes I forget that this is only the first or the second time that you are hearing it, and I guess I expect you to understand it, or I just assume that you understand it.
The Lord is building patience into me. Although I understand much more now than I used to, if the day ever comes that I do not meet your need because I do not understand your need, please forgive me. Do not go away and disappear. Just come and talk to me about it, because I am not perfect yet, myself. Ask me again, or tell me how you feel, and I will try to meet your need as best as I can. Glory to God.
If there is any defense of myself at all, this is not just a teaching situation. The spiritual forces that are present, as you try to learn, and as I try to teach, are very great. They do not want us to communicate. They want us to get mad at one another, and they are going to stir up whatever ungodliness is still in us that they could possibly find to set us one against the other.
All of us, being imperfect, must, by the grace of God, take authority over whatever is still imperfect in us and not let it influence us. We must deal with it in Christ, and that is the challenge. I am sure most of you know, because you are mature believers, that whatever is being preached in a ministry, is what is being worked into you spiritually. If you go to a ministry where they are preaching the baptism with the Holy Ghost all the time, you will likely receive it.
In the last message, we found out that it is not the baptism of the Holy Ghost. In this hour, it is receiving the Holy Ghost which is a lesser manifestation of that. You are likely to receive a measure of the Holy Ghost if you submit to that ministry for any length of time. If they are preaching faith, you are likely to receive faith if you submit yourself to that ministry for any length of time. What we are preaching here is perfection.
First of all, we do not enter into perfection without our sins being revealed, so that they could be dealt with, so that we could become perfect. When you sit under this kind of ministry, I do not mean Living Epistles, and I do not mean me, I am talking about the spiritual ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ known as Perfection. It is a mature ministry. If you are here, He wants to bring you into perfection.
When you sit under this kind of teaching, and when you sit under the anointing that comes with it, what is going to happen is that whatever sin is in your heart is going to be revealed, and that goes for me too. The way the Lord reveals it is that He puts you in a situation where it is going to manifest. The challenge is what do you do with it when it manifests. That is the challenge.
Are you going to agree with it, and even if you agree with it, it is not too late to rise up and say, I repent, Lord, set it straight. Are you going to let it bring you to a disagreement or whatever it is trying to do, or are you going to let it drive you out?
I do not really know you people that well. I have had all kinds of people pass through here, and to me you seem to be just natural people. You seem to be pretty calm, well-adjusted people, but we never know what is in the depths of our heart. I have warned you.
If you see me sighing deeply, it is because I have warned so many people, and they all sit there, and say aha, aha, and when God presses their buttons, they lose all understanding. In the past, with maybe one or two exceptions, they have risen up, and yielded to the wickedness that was exposed in them. I just pray for all of you. I pray for the best, and I pray that you make it through, and that you go on to perfection when God reveals your sins.
You must have sins, because you are not perfect. I am not insulting you. It has got to be there. When He reveals sin in you, when the anointing coming through this ministry presses your buttons, and your sins are revealed, I pray that you take the victory in Christ Jesus. I pray that you see it for what it is, and that you slay it by the power of Almighty God.
The way you slay it is that you refuse to agree with it. If it comes on you so fast that you do agree with it, you always have the option of repenting and starting all over again. If it is just in your mind, you just have to repent before God. If you permit it to attack another believer then I believe, we all know here, that you just have to go and make it right with your brother or sister.
It is never too late, never, ever, too late. The biggest enemy of the spiritual man is pride. There is no male or female in Christ Jesus, so as we go on to perfection, we are all in spiritual manhood. Our biggest enemy is pride. As the Lord reveals our sins, if the pride that says, I do not want to admit it is greater than our desire for Christ, we will react out of our carnal mind, which is as a natural man reacts. Those reactions vary.
The most typical reaction is to accuse the person that has been at the other end of your manifestation, who has been the recipient of your ungodly manifestation, to accuse them of doing what has come forth from you. The most typical manifestation of someone who is yielding to pride is to go with it, and to stick with it, and to insist that the other person is the guilty party. They may even believe it.
Even if this is happening to you, this can be overcome even if the other person is the guilty party. We must be reconciled in Christ. There can be no ongoing hostility, there can be no ongoing separation, and there can be no ongoing hard feelings in Christ. It does not matter who is wrong.
The way to deal with it is not to go before the Lord, and say, Well Lord, they did it to me. The way is to go before God, and say, Lord, whatever part I had in it, I repent. I pray for both of us. Bring reconciliation. If that is your heart before God, even if a deceiving spirit has got a hold on your mind, it will never succeed. It will never succeed. It does not matter who is right or who is wrong.
Nobody has any right to be offended in Christ Jesus. We must obey the Lord, and the word of the Lord is that we are to love one another, even if that other person is hating us. We are wasting our time, and we are wasting our mental facilities if we are trying to find out whose fault it was.
Reconciliation requires a greater effort on our part. Let us say it requires a seventy-five percent effort on our part, and a twenty-five percent effort on the other person’s part, because we are more mature than they are, or we have more control over our ungodliness or carnal nature. Whatever the reason, God is going to require it of you. There is no fairness in Christ, as the carnal mind sees fairness.
If you are mature, and you have the ability, after being stabbed to the point of spiritual death by somebody, and Jesus Christ makes a judgment that you are mature to the point that you could stand up and go to that person, and say, Look, God loves you, and everything is okay, and let us be one in Christ again. They could be so demonized that as you extend yourself to them, they are still turning their back on you, God requires you to do it.
This is not a trial of one believer compared to another believer. We are all being measured up against our standard, which is Jesus Christ. I have had people come to me, and say, I am not as bad as the other guy. It does not matter if you are not as bad as the other guy. You are still a fallen creation, and you are still going to die, unless the Father seals His nature upon you.
In case you do not know it, we are all sealed with Satan. We all have the mark of the beast. It is in our mind. The whole world has the mark of the beast, but the miracle that is happening in this hour is that the Lord Jesus Christ is erasing that mark. He is going to replace it with His mark, which is His mind, in His righteousness.
It does not matter if you are better than the next guy. You are still dead. Everything that you do, and every way in which you relate to your brother or sister is building Christ in you when you put your own feelings aside, and your own pride aside, and your own needs aside, to fulfill the Scripture which says, Love your brother as you would love yourself, and do unto others as you would have them to do unto you.
God forbid, if you were or ever used to be in such a pitiful spiritual condition that you could manifest wickedness, and be incapable of repenting or have mercy on that person that is so in the gall of bitterness that they are literally trapped within their own mind. I have seen it. They are literally trapped within their own mind. They are hurting, and they are in pain, and they are incapable of making it right with you. Either they do not know what to do, or they are so bound by pride that they cannot do it, so you go to them. When you do that, the seal of Satan is being removed from your mind.
What is sealed? Our soul is sealed. The engraving tool is the spiritual life, which is cutting its impression in the soft clay of our soul. As the Lord changes us from being sealed by the spirit of Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, to being sealed by the Spirit of God, He is rubbing that clay.
I know that most of us have heard that we are sandpaper and are rubbing each other. That is true, but take it a step deeper. He is literally rubbing that engraving off. Just think of it in the natural. How do you rub an engraving off? If it is in metal, you shave that metal, and you shave that metal, and you shave that metal, until the engraving is gone. You work in wood, and you do it in wood too. You keep shaving it, and shaving it, until you have a flat piece of wood. Then when it is flat, the Lord puts His seal in it.
It is not just that we are receiving the seal of the Father. The seal of Satan is being removed from us. What have you gained if you stand before God in a spirit of pride, and say, Look at what they did to me. Why should I be the one to humble myself, and why should I go to them, and why should I make it right, and why should I give them what they are lusting for? Why? Because as you do it, the seal of Satan is being shaved off of your soul, and you are being reformed in the image of Christ.
What am I saying in a nutshell? I am saying that everything you do with regard to your relationships with people is either killing you or making you alive. You might be saying to yourself, Why should I give it to her? Why should I do it for her? Why should I help him? Because when you do it, it is saving you from the death which is the carnal mind.
Then again, do not be deceived. The Lord just told me to tell you this. You cannot be doing this when your motive is that you want the power of the Godhead. The motive must be that we love Jesus so much that we desire to be in His image. We cannot do this without the power of God. We cannot go to someone that has just devastated you with what they have done, without the power of God. If your motive is wrong, you are not going to have the power of God.
As we read the account in the Old Testament, you are going to go up to the battle, and you are going to be destroyed because you went up with the wrong motive. As we are told in the Old Testament, God did not send you. God did not say, Go up and fight, and they were destroyed. They were beaten. When God said, Go up and fight, no one was killed, and not one man was wounded.
I declare to you that when you wage this warfare, and you go and fight in the realm of the Spirit, and your motive is that you love Jesus so much that you desire His righteousness, and everything of His life, you surely shall not be killed. You are going to be wounded, but what is actually being wounded in you is your adamic man who has to die anyway. Christ in you shall not be wounded, and He shall not be killed. Glory to God. Did you have a question?
COMMENT: My brother-in-law said some things to me that were not very nice. He got mad at me and started to manifest. After a couple of weeks, I started to feel in my heart, the carnal part of me felt very bitter, hurt, and that I wanted to get back at him. I said, No, I cannot. It is in my heart, and I know that is sin.
When that happens to me, when I feel that way, when people do me wrong, my nature just wants to retaliate. I do not wish that person’s death or anything like that, but deep in my heart, maybe I do. I know it is wrong, and I say, Lord, I do not want to feel this way. I say, please let Christ rise up in me, and overtake this. I must admit I get angry when that happens to me, when people do me wrong, and say really bad things to me that are not very nice, that are not even true.
If somebody were to tell me the truth, I guess it would hurt, but in my brother-in-law’s case, I knew he was wrong. This has been going on for years. I would say something to him before, but when he calls the house, I do not say anything now. God knows deep down inside me that it is not right. He knows how I feel. He knows how hurt I was. Sometimes my grandmother might say things to me that hurt. I would not scream at her, but my voice would get high. This is how I am. What should I do?
PASTOR VITALE: Your brother-in-law’s heart was evil towards you. A lot of people do not know who the real them is. They would like to say that when they are nice and sweet and on their best social behavior that, that is the real them, but that is not true. The real you is the way you act when the fire come on you. That is the real you.
COMMENT: Every night, I pray, Lord, Father, forgive me, if I said or did anything that is not of you. I have a prayer life, and I love to pray to God, but I know every day that there are things in my heart that are not right. I always have to ask God for forgiveness all the time, because I may say or do things that are not of God. Sometimes, I say, Lord, why did you choose me? I know He loves me, and that He died for me, but I say, Lord, you know there are things in me that are not right. They have to be corrected.
PASTOR VITALE: Nobody is right today except Jesus, and He is not even in the flesh anymore. He is in our flesh today. Nobody is right. The reason He chose you and all of us, because we are all in the same boat, is because He loves us, and it is His intention to save this creation.
He gives us the strength. The strength He is giving us is that He is giving us Himself to purify our souls. This whole creation will self-destruct in the very near future, because God the Father is a righteous God. He will destroy all sin.
The creation fell. The creation is the beast who was wounded unto death, yet it lives. We were spiritually slain, yet we still have an existence. We fell down into hell where we exist in a condition of separation from God which is hell, which is the whole world today. Even those of us that are coming back into Christ, we are still in hell. The Scripture clearly states that God is in hell.
He certainly spreads a table before us in the valley of the shadow of death right down here, but when I talk like this, I do not want anyone getting upset with me, misunderstanding my words, or laying hold of my words. I know that we have Christ, but we have a measure of Christ.
We are experiencing Christ, but we are still in hell. We have the promise that the gates of hell, which are trying to keep us here, shall not prevail against the Lord Jesus Christ. We are going to break through the gates of hell, and we are going to get out.
I know that the Church world preaches to you that we are breaking into hell, but I am sorry, they have it backwards. We are in hell, and we are locked in by our chains, which are our sins and the sins of our ancestors.
There is no way we would ever get out if Jesus Christ did not give Himself to us as a ransom. He did not just pay money so that we should get out, but He gave us, literally, Himself. He has joined Himself to us, and He is making Himself a very part of our being. By that addition to our spiritual nature, we shall overcome and break through the gates of hell, and return into the Garden of Eden.
We are all imperfect, and this is a very, very heavy labor. Labor is not works. When we say that we are not saved by works but by grace, works are what you do out of your carnal mind. There is a big difference. We do labor in Christ. By the power of Christ, we labor to overcome sin in our heart, and go against our very nature while our heart is screaming, Punch him, kill him, how dare he do that to me? Retaliate, hurt. Our carnal heart is screaming that.
We rise up in love, we pray for them, we pray for their deliverance, we pray for their salvation, we go to them, and we attempt to make reconciliation even though we did nothing wrong. We keep welcoming them back. That is a labor in Christ that we could never do if we did not have the power of Christ.
We will labor until we break through the gates of hell and return to Eden. Works are when you are not touching, when you are not dealing with your carnal emotions, but you are covering them over. The Scripture says a white wash, that your motive is not to be righteous and obey the commandments of God but to look good to men. Does anyone not understand that big difference?
I know I did not understand that for a long time. I know there are a lot of people in the Church today, in the mature Church, that think there is nothing for them to do, Because salvation is not of works; therefore, what kind of a labor is there? I just go to church and read my Bible and do whatever I have to do, and not bother anybody, and Jesus is going to do the whole thing. These people believe that.
If you believe that, you are very deceived. They say that Jesus did the completed work on the cross, every curse was broken, every disease was healed, everything was done two thousand years ago. If you have a problem, you have no faith.
Look at what the carnal mind does. They start off by believing a false doctrine. By misunderstanding what Jesus’ work on the cross accomplished, they misunderstand it. Let me just state here, for the record, what Jesus accomplished on the cross was that He made a way to impart His spiritual life, and the strength that comes with it, to impart it into us permanently.
Not that it should be a manifestation such as the Hebrew prophets received, but the Spirit of God would come upon them, speak its message, and withdraw. The work on the cross was a spiritual work that made a way for the Life of Christ to be joined to us permanently so that, we, by the grace of God, could lay hold of it as a spiritual weapon and destroy sin in our minds and return into Eden.
To make it short, what am I saying? His work imparted weapons to us. It made possible what previously was impossible. To think that there is nothing for you to do, except read the Bible, that is a terrible error. If you believe it, and you do not wage the warfare, you shall surely perish. Your sins are still with you.
If you do not start living out of what has been imparted to you, if you do not start living out of your New Mind, which is Christ and which is righteous, if you continue to yield to your ungodly desires and thoughts of the impulses of your Satanic heart, your sins are still with you. You are still in your sins.
There is a great paradox in the world. It looks like it is true, but it is not true. It looks like it should not be true. It is called a paradox. It looks like a great contradiction. They could be somebody, who when you look at them with your carnal eyes, their life is a disaster. Their emotional problems are great. Their social problems are great. Maybe they are having trouble holding a job. You just look at them and see a troubled person. They could be laboring in Christ with every strength that He has imparted to them, and their victory is assured because they have picked up the weapons of their warfare.
Then, you could look at somebody whose life was never ever that difficult or that damaged from the day of their birth, and they received the Lord into their heart. If you look at them, they look like they are greatly matured beyond the troubled person, but the truth is that they started at different points. When they both received Christ, one was a very troubled person with all kinds of emotional problems, and an addictive personality, an abusive personality, but they picked up the weapon that was given to them, and they are fighting.
The other person that just, for whatever reason, had a simple problem in their life compared to what I just described, and they received their weapons too, but they are not waging the warfare. They are not laboring in Christ. The carnal mind looks at these two people, and condemns the person with all the social problems.
They cannot see that if you just wait, the one with all the social problems is going to totally surpass the other person that looks like they are okay in Christ. It is a big deception. At the root of this deception is the pride of your heart.
We see in the Church, there are a lot of people whose lives are okay. They get along with people, they have a home to live in, they have a decent job, their families are in order, and they do not want anything to do with the troubled in the Church. If you really analyze it, they just want them to get away from them.
If you square root it, their motive is that they are afraid that what is on those troubled people is going to get on them. They do not know who they are. They do not know that if we live out of Christ, we have the authority to help them stand up. Almost everyone that is in Christ has an identity problem.
I do not care how much you say it, we really do not believe we are Christ. If we really believed we were Christ, we would not be afraid to go to those that are spiritually infested, but we run from them. To justify our wicked hearts, we tell them that they are in that condition, because they have no faith. May God have mercy on every believer that has ever done that.
If you hear yourself on this tape, repent. Repent! You are in trouble with the Lord.
COMMENT: Would you say that is the spirit of the Laodicean Church that feels they do not have a need like the other people who are troubled?
PASTOR VITALE: God has given me a spiritual message, and I am not an expert on the Word. I do not remember what the Scripture says about the Laodicean church.
COMMENT: That is in the Book of Revelation. They feel they are rich and have no need for anything.
PASTOR VITALE: That sounds right. They think that they are okay. They think that they are saved, and they do not need anything. They are not saved. We are not saved until the image of the Father is engraved upon us. Again, false doctrine builds on that, because this false doctrine is being preached that when you receive the Holy Ghost, that is your salvation, and then you think there in nothing for you to do.
Look at how wicked false doctrine is. Doctrine is very important, and false doctrine kills us. If these people were being taught that you have received the Holy Ghost, you have received your weapons, you have received the vehicle by which you may be saved when you get to the end of your faith, when you work through your faith to its ultimate you shall be saved.
If you are being taught that, they would know that they were not okay. They were not being taught that. They are told that they are fine, that they are forgiven, that if they sin, well, you just say you are sorry, which is what you do in the Roman Catholic Church. You say a few Hail Mary’s, and when you die you are going to go to heaven. What a terrible lie. False doctrine is very wicked. It kills. Did I answer your question?
It kills your own spiritual growth, and also, you are going to be held accountable for not helping the weak, because the Scripture clearly states, When you have been strengthened, strengthen the weak. I have experienced this. I am just as human as anyone, and I am not excluding myself from anything that I say.
Our pride is so strong that we feel if we pray for people, and they do not make an immediate recovery, it is so painful to our pride that we would rather not pray for them, or we would rather blame it on them and say, There is a reason why you are just so reprobate that Jesus has not healed you.
Pride will make you say in your mind, One person has to be righteous, and the other unrighteous. One person has to be right, and the other has to be wrong. That is what pride will tell you, but it is not true. We do the best we can with the measure of the weapons that He has given us, and it is just a measure.
We are not in the shape of the Father yet. We are in transition. We are obedient, and do what we have to do, and the Father, either He heals or delivers or He does not. Pride says, I failed. It is just like pride to say, If you get healed, I healed you.
You did not heal, and neither did you fail to heal. Therefore, you go out, and you have mercy on the sick and the afflicted, and you do everything you can to help them. You pray for them, and you bless them, and what God does, He does, and what He does not do, He does not do.
If you feel bad because they did not get healed, not out of compassion for them, but if your pride is wounded, because they were not healed or delivered, you need to repent. That is no excuse to stop praying for people. We see that all over the Church today. It is very sad. It is all over what I call the mature Church. Maybe it is not even the mature Church. They are mature in doctrine. They do not want to pray for the people. They will not pray for you.
The ministries do not give out their phone numbers. I tried to call one ministry, and his number was unlisted. They do not want to pray for you. They have this revelation that they cannot do anything, and only God could do it, so they decided they do not want to pray for you. That is a false doctrine.
We must pray healing, we must pray deliverance, we must bear one another’s burdens, we must listen to one another, we must counsel, we must comfort, but we must be careful that it is not coming out of our carnal mind.
I know if somebody comes to me unexpectedly, and I find myself in a situation where I am listening to their hard times, I always pray silently, Lord, let me respond out of Christ. If we respond out of our carnal mind, we are killing them. They do not want or need our carnal counsel.
What I perceive to be one of the biggest errors in the praying Church today, those who are willing to pray for people, is when a believer comes to them and says, Please pray for me, and this is what I need prayer in, they pray out of the Holy Spirit, but then they counsel, and the counsel is not the Holy Spirit. The person never asked for counsel.
My counsel to you, as the one who is leading this meeting, is if someone asks for prayer, you pray for them, and do not assume that counseling goes with it unless you know without a shadow of a doubt, that as a result of your prayer, the Lord has anointed you with divine counsel for them. Otherwise, if they ask for prayer, just pray. Do not counsel them out of your carnal mind. You are killing them.
COMMENT: Do you feel when a minister does not have his phone listed, do you think they do not want to fulfill the Scripture to be instant in season and out of season, because it is their own private time and they do not want to be disturbed?
PASTOR VITALE: To be honest with you, I cannot answer that question. I have to be very careful not to go over a line, or I am criticizing God’s anointed. I am criticizing certain behavior in the Church, because I believe God has told me to expose it for what it is, but for the individual minister, I do not know what they are thinking. In all fairness to them, I am not against these ministers.
If any of them hear these tapes, I hope that they get delivered from it, but I think a large part of the problem is that they have been very hurt by God’s people. It is very painful to be in the ministry. Why? Because God’s people are vipers. You know, Mark 16:16, And you shall take up serpents. Who do you think the serpents are? They are God’s people, and they bite you.
A lot of God’s ministers have been hurt to the point that they do not want to pray. Anyone hearing this tape, I tell you, you cannot be hurt to the point that you do not want to pray. You are to be hurt unto death praying for these vipers, unto your death.
The only exception to that is when the Lord God tells you to turn somebody over. You cannot decide to turn somebody over. You pray for them, and you minister to them, and you try to help them unto your spiritual death. Should the Lord decide to do it, He will move people out of your life. I have seen Him move people out of my life, but I cannot move them out of my life.
To be frank with you, I am struggling with this right now. There is someone that I want moved out of my life. I do not want to ever see them or talk to them again, but I know it is not God. I keep praying, Lord, give me your heart, give me your heart. I wake up in the morning, and I know that He has given me His heart. If I see them that day, I could welcome them in love. Then if other pressures come on me during the day, I say, If they come to the door, I am not going to let them in the house. The Lord says to me, What do you mean by you are not going to let them in the house? You let them in the house. If they bite you again, they bite you again.
COMMENT: I believe what God is trying to say, the reason why the ministers do that, is that they are living in fear. When they are living in fear, they are forgetting the Scripture that says, The Lord will never give you more than you can take.
PASTOR VITALE: Amen. Amen. You can express it that way, that they are living in fear, but the bottom line is that they feel that they cannot bear being hurt anymore, but it is not true. As you just said, the Lord said that He will not give you more than you could bear.
Number one: Preachers, if you are listening to this tape, I condemn you not. I bless whoever is out there that is being persecuted for righteousness sake, and I pray that this tape will be used to strengthen you. I am not criticizing anyone who is hearing this tape, but I would like to remind you that if you yield to this desire to run from the pain, to protect yourself from the pain, number one, you are not living out of Christ, because Christ forgave them hanging on the cross, so you are not living out of Christ.
He never ran away from the people. He submitted to it all.
Number two: You are turning away the procedure that is going to bring you into perfection, so there is nothing gained by this. There is nothing gained by it. We have no right to defend ourselves against God’s people, who are vipers. God help us.
COMMENT: I am sorry to ask so many questions. I feel that what the Lord is saying, the reason He would like their phone number is because it could be a suicide attempt, and out of desperation they may just be calling, and that may be the last hope.
PASTOR VITALE: Definitely. This does not mean that as a preacher or as a minister of Christ that we are to be subjected to any abuse beyond that which the Lord God permits us to be abused. We do have rights.
I do not really know how to say this, but assuming that you are praying and that your mind is under the anointing of Christ as a minister, I will tell you, there are people that I will say to them, That is enough. I will not discuss this any further, but I am not allowed to put anybody out of my life. Do you understand that?
I will say to somebody that this is an ungodly conversation and that is enough. I might even ask you to leave my house if you are out of control, and you are not willing to try to get control. I will pray with you if you want to try to get control, but I cannot put you out of my life.
Do you understand the difference? We, as ministers, and anyone that is a true believer, I believe we have to be available to minister to anyone that the Lord sends to us. If you have an open phone number, and you get a few nuts on the telephone, I believe we have authority in Christ to not listen to you if you are cursing me out.
I do not have to do that, but I have had people call me with obscene phone calls, and I have not hung up on them. I have prayed for them. You go according to the mind of Christ.
The point that I am making, and I hope I am making it clear, you cannot put anybody out of your life. Only Jesus can remove someone from your life, but if in a particular encounter, that has turned very ungodly, and you have prayed silently in your mind as you are talking to the person, and the conversation does not turn around, the Lord may very well be telling you to stand up in Christ and say, That is enough. It is over, and I will talk to you another time. Do you see the difference?
We cannot put people out of our lives. We are all one flesh. Aside from being all one flesh, the answer is not to separate yourself. The carnal mind says, If somebody is tormenting me, the answer is to separate from them. If my husband is tormenting me, the answer is a divorce. If my wife is tormenting me, I will separate myself from her. That is not the answer, because when your heart is in Christ and is right with Christ, you will not receive the torment or even if you receive it, it will not stop you from ministering to the one who is tormenting you.
As I said, in Mark 16:16, we are told we are going to take up serpents. If you look those words up in the Greek, those words, take up, is translated from the same Greek word. Excuse me, that said Jesus was taken up, to describe His ascension. It is the same Greek word. We are down here in hell. We are going to lay hold of the serpents in the pit, the spiritual root of men that are utterly given over to Satan.
Whether they have received the Holy Spirit or not, they are still living out of the pit. We are going to lay hold of them. How? Through our relationship with them. We are going to form a soul tie with them, and they are not going to destroy us. We are going to raise them up.
Later on in the Book of Acts, of course, we see Paul being bitten by a serpent and not hurt. I am sure it happened in the natural, but it is a very symbolic way, or it is a parable of God telling us, You shall not die from the bite of these poisonous serpents.
Mankind, the individual human beings are asps. They are poisonous asps. If you do not have Christ in you, if you are a natural person, and you come in contact with this kind of a malevolent human being, some are more malevolent than others, they could kill you.
Someone just asked if that was a family line curse. Yes, that is a family line curse that has gone pretty far along many generations where you find parents mentally destroying their children.
We have a big problem with child abuse in this country today. We see sexual abuse and physical abuse, and we can look at that and say that is pretty terrible, but what is being revealed today, usually described as a dysfunctional family, is that we have many human beings that would not touch their children. They have some degree of morality and righteousness, but they are so damaged themselves, that without meaning to do it, just the way they think is killing their children. They are negative. They are fearful because of the way they think.
Again, they do not realize what they are doing. They make their children dependent. They do not let them mature. They are crushing their spirit. Some of these children actually get physically sick and die. Some of them have all kinds of mental disorders. The mind of man can destroy a human being that is weaker.
A better way to express it is a mind that is very far from Christ has authority over anybody. It has the power to destroy, a man over his wife, or a wife over the children. They can mean the very best for their children, but if their mind is in such a condition, so far from Christ, they can destroy the fruit of their own womb.
This is a very hard word, and I just have to say this for anyone hearing the tape, I am not condemning anybody. There was a time fifty years ago where they blamed everything that happened to the children on the parents. Now it is very popular to not blame anybody. No blame is imputed in our society. I am sorry, but there is blame.
I understand that you did not know what you were doing, but there is blame, because these are family line curses, and they are coming all the way down. If you are hearing this tape, and you have children that are being destroyed, or if you have a wife that is being destroyed, that is depressed all the time, I am telling you that, in Christ, you have authority to turn this around.
If you have authority over family members, God-given authority, you turn to Christ, and you let Him start dealing with you, and you watch Him turn your family around. If you cleave unto the mess that is in your mind, and I am not picking on you, everybody is messed up, just in different degrees. If you cleave unto the mess that is in your mind, and if you have family members that are in trouble, especially if more than fifty percent of your family is in trouble, you had better believe there are family line curses operating there. You, as the authority, have the potential to save your entire family if you turn to Christ with everything that you have got, and let Him start cleaning you up.
You cannot go to Him and say, Clean up my son, and you cannot go to Him and say, Clean up my wife, because I am telling you right now that you should not be surprised if you hear this tape and you turn to Christ, He is going to start by cleaning you up. If you are going with a heart that you are okay, and your wife or your husband is a mess, or your kids are a mess, or what did you do to deserve this family life, forget it. You are in a wrong attitude. He will receive you, but He will start with you.
COMMENT: Suppose there is somebody who is not in Christ, but has many counts of having incest, and you are not in a position where you can go to him or her and discuss it. Can you, outside of the family, start to pray for them to get the revelation, because you cannot judge, because you do not know if it was really him or the family line curses that would have caused it? What would you do in a case like this?
PASTOR VITALE: We talked about this before. We have to be very careful how we pray. In a situation like this, I would not do anything other than give them to the Lord and wait and see if He anointed me to pray.
In my own life, the Lord brought me to a family where I saw emotional incest manifesting. I would be very surprised if it was physical, but it was very real to anyone with discernment what was going on there. The whole family is in crisis, and it is really bad. The Lord let me see it. Everybody is suffering.
There is one person in the family that is sick and is probably going to die earlier than she should die because there are spiritual forces of destruction that are on the family. It is manifesting in infirmity in this one person and incest in these other two people in the family.
I went before the Lord and I cried. I said, Lord, I do not know what to pray. These people are not in Christ, and I am afraid that if I break the power of that incest, that I could hurt them more than I am going to help them. Three months later, in this case it took three months, the Lord spoke to me, and He said, Start praying against the incest, and I prayed.
This is a big problem in the Church with very well-meaning Christians. They look at people’s lives, and they are starting to get discernment, and they see the sin, and they think that they have the authority to go in and pray against it, and you do not. You do not. You say, Lord, I see the problem. I bless the family. I pray for their salvation. If there is anything you would have me to do or anything that you would have me to pray, show me and I will do it.
Just recently, in my own life, I started having nightmares. It was every single night. I knew it was not God. God has given me a lot of experiences with dreams. I knew it was not God. It was every night. I was crying out to God, What is going on here? I did not know what it was, but if it ever happens again, I will know.
It turned out that someone, who is a friend of mine, just took it upon herself to start praying about my life. It turns out that her discernment about my life was not God. She is a Christian, and she had just recently gotten into a deliverance Church where they are teaching them to bind and loose. She looked at my life with her undelivered mind and thought she was blessing me. She made several judgments as to what is wrong in my life and started binding and loosing. The only problem was her judgments were not of God.
I am not going to say I cannot be toppled because of where I am in Christ, because I know the Scripture that says, if I say that, I am sure to fall. I will tell you this, and it is the truth. God has got me real strong. He has got a real strong hold on me. It is really hard to topple me. It is really hard. I am not saying it is impossible, but it is really hard.
If someone started praying this way against someone that did not have the training that I have, whatever she was praying for, probably, they would have yielded to it, and they would have found themselves doing things that were against their will. These psychic prayers would have changed their mind. I could just hear them saying, I just changed my mind, and I do not know why I did that. That is probably what would have happened.
Because I am where God has got me, and I give Him all the glory, because I am where He has brought me to in Christ, it is really hard to do that to me. When someone is praying psychic prayers against you, and you will not yield to what they want to accomplish in your life, what happens is that you receive torment in your mind. It is a form of spiritual punishment.
People get very upset when I talk this way, but I am telling you the truth. I am not going to help you by lying to you. Satan is the worst of taskmasters. If someone is praying a psychic prayer, they are praying out of Satan in their own mind. I am sorry, but it is just the truth. God did not tell her to pray those prayers. If Satan is praying through your mind, and you are not bending to the will of that person, you get punished. Let me tell you, I was in bad shape for a good two weeks.
One day it was so bad, the Lord told me to call up a particular woman to help pray with me. For whatever reason, He does not use the same person every time. He is not letting anybody get lifted up in pride. This time He used that woman. He gave her discernment, and He told me, in my heart, Send back the curses. I do not usually send back curses. I will not send back curses unless it is a specific instruction from the Lord.
I did not tell her what I heard in my heart, because I questioned whether it was God. Then she said to me, God told me to send back the curses. To me that was a second witness. I told her that, and we sent back the curses.
One week to the day, it was exposed who was doing it, and what was happening. I wound up in a conversation with this person and I rebuked her. She was horrified. She thought she was doing a good thing. What does the Scripture say? The day is going to come that those that are trying to destroy you are going to think that they are doing a good work for Christ.
When I told her she was hurting me, the first thing she did was rebuke me for being a lying spirit. I talked to her on the telephone. I said, I do not believe this, she is rebuking a lying spirit. I told her the truth. Then by the end of the conversation, she had at least prayed that if it was true, that the Lord reveal it to her. She did not believe it, but she had opened her heart to the conviction of the Lord, and I have not heard from her since.
It was two weeks of devastation, walking around like I had a cinder block on my shoulders, every ungodly emotion you could imagine. There were nightmares every night. She wrecked havoc in my life, because she thought that she had a right to pray about my life. Be very careful.
I will just repeat it for the tape. You see the problem, you go before the Lord, and you say, Lord, like another problem that we saw, I see this young couple. They have an ungodly soul tie. I put them before you. I bless them. I love them. I ask that you help them. If you would let me partake of this ministry to them, you show me how you want me to pray.
To go and say, Lord, break up that ungodly couple, as I explained to someone in this situation that I am talking about, the young lady was very fragile. If we broke that relationship, not in Christ, but in the power of our natural mind, which is Satanic power, she could have been hurt really bad, if not destroyed. Before God separates, He makes a place for the people to run to. This young girl could have really been hurt. We are just not there yet. I am not there yet. We have to get the mind of Christ before we pray warfare.
I said to this woman on the phone, Please do not pray, as the conversation unfolded. I did not even ask her, she just volunteered that she was praying for me. I said, You were praying for me? What have you been praying? When she told me, I said, Please do not pray for me. She was insulted that I asked her not to pray for me. She was refusing to believe what I was telling her. She said, This is terrible. What kind of Christianity is this if I cannot pray for you?
What I told her, I am going to put on this tape. You want to pray for somebody. You bless them. You pray for their salvation. You pray that Christ increase in them. You pray that Christ deliver them from every form of destruction, but you do not make a judgment as to what kind of prayer they need for their life circumstance. It is witchcraft.
When I was preaching two or three times a week, I was working in Manhattan, traveling more than two hours each way to Manhattan and back. I was traveling five hours a day, and preaching twice a week. It was superhuman. I do not know how I did it. I had friends of mine praying to get me out of Manhattan, but God sent me to Manhattan. As crazy as it seemed to the carnal mind, God had people in Manhattan that He wanted me to go to, that He sent me to. He made a judgment that I could tolerate it.
Who are you to ask God to move me out of Manhattan? Who are you to rebuke my traveling into Manhattan? How dare you make a judgment about my life, when I am telling you that God told me to do it. Then you made a judgment that God did not tell me that. How dare you?
COMMENT: I feel very glad that you did share this. We were in a deliverance Church, and we used to pray one way. One day it dawned on the pastor not to say any kind of prayers of this sort, because you are using witchcraft. Now it feels good, not that you had to go through it, but now you know the damage that it can cause. Thank you for sharing that.
PASTOR VITALE: It can cause terrible damage.
COMMENT: The best way to pray is always pray that God’s will be done.
PASTOR VITALE: Amen. Amen. Let me comment on that. I do not want anyone listening to this tape thinking that it would have been all right to pray, Get Sheila out of Manhattan. I rebuke that lie in her mind that wants her in Manhattan, but nevertheless let God’s will be done. Listen to my words.
Even though you add, Let God’s will be done, after a prayer like that, your true heart has made a judgment that I have not heard from God, but that you have heard from God about my life, and it still goes forth as a psychic prayer. If your heart is wrong, even though you are praying for God’s will, you are still praying a psychic prayer. You should not pray about somebody’s life unless you know for sure God has spoken to you. COMMENT: God’s will to be done with a right heart is the best way.
PASTOR VITALE: It has to be a heart that really believes, whatever you want Lord. We have a whole church full of little witches out there. There is a whole world full of Christian witches who really are praying their will on you, and they justify their witchcraft by saying, Nevertheless, Lord, your will, not mine. You had better try your own heart because you are going to pay the price for this.
COMMENT: I wanted to share this with you. You were talking about nightmares you were having. When I was nine years old I had a reoccurring nightmare where I would go to sleep, wake up in the middle of the night all sweaty and nervous. Then I would go back to sleep only to conclude the dream I had.
To make it brief the dream was about my family. My parents were married at the time, and there was my sister and me. I do not know if you ever heard of this very demonic movie called, The Exorcist? In my dream, I had a dream about spirits, all these demons, people that were possessed by Satan, coming into our home trying to destroy my family.
In the dream, it looked like that girl that was in The Exorcist from a long time ago. That was what the dream was basically about. I would wake up in the middle of the night and then go back to sleep, only it would be like a conclusion. It was so frightening. I do not know what was happening, and I wanted to ask you about it.
PASTOR VITALE: I have no anointed answer for you right now, so I would rather keep quiet. Dreams can be of God. This is my test. I will tell you the way I test a dream. Sometimes I get dreams that are very distressful to me, and they are of God. To say that you wake up, and you are upset, to assume that the dream is not of God, that is not true.
Frequently, as we move on in Christ, these dreams are no longer dreams, but they are night visions, which means that we literally enter into the realm of the Spirit and experience what is happening. That is very exciting, except that the feelings that you feel is very unpleasant. It is the beginning of a spiritual experience which could be very exciting. I am just having trouble getting my words together. Let me try again.
As God brings us to a place where we literally enter into the realm of the Spirit, eventually, as we are developed enough, we will be able to pray from that position with a power that we cannot have when we are in the soul realm. Can you hear what I am saying?
When you are in the realm of the Spirit legally, when Christ has raised you up to a realm of the Spirit, and you pray, that is the place where you say it and it is done.
When we are praying from down here in hell, our prayer has to break through all of the layers, and sometimes God honors it, and sometimes He does not. I do not have all the answers, and I cannot really tell you why it has to be so upsetting. I have awakened, and it has really been upsetting, but God is developing us to a place.
The thought just popped into my mind, it is our adamic soul that is so horrified at being so close to God. As we enter into that place, when we pray whatever prayer God gives us, it is done. It is very exciting.
Going back about six or seven years ago, I woke up, and oh God, was I oppressed. It was horrible. I was dreaming about a coffin and a funeral. I woke up and just assumed it was not God. I started breaking the curses, and rebuking Satan, and I got a phone call. A believe in our fellowship that had been sick for a long time had died. It was not a Satanic dream. I had literally entered into the realm of the Spirit, and God had told me that she had passed away in the night.
The only answer I have for you as to why you have to feel so bad is what God just popped into my mind, that it is adam who was so horrified at being so close to the things of God. We still are subject to adam’s feelings. This is our problem. We are really Christ, but we are still feeling with adam’s feelings. We are a double soul, and it could be painful.
As you know, I had a dream in someone’s house the other morning, and I woke up, and I was really upset. I knew it was God, and this is how I knew it was God, because the symbols in the dream were very clear. There was a two year old child. There was the slaughter of a cat, which means witchcraft. I woke up from the dream with a recollection of real things; a child, the death of a child, the child’s father, and the slaughter of an animal. This is really a night vision.
When I wake up out of something like that, the first thing I do is ask God to help me. I get a pencil and paper right away to see if I could recall these primary points. Whether it is a dream or it is a night vision, fantasy is mixed with reality. It is all mixed up together. What I do is I sit down with a pencil and paper, and I ask God to help me to recall whatever He wants me to recall. I then write down the main points.
As soon as I saw it was a young child in my dream, because I have a natural child, and I have many spiritual children, right away I pray, Father, I just break the power of witchcraft over all my natural and spiritual children, and I pray that you help them and that you bless them. If there is anything else you want me to do, you will have to let me know what you want me to pray.
Within five or six hours I got a phone call from the person that this dream was about. They told me what their problem was, and I prayed for them and they got deliverance on the phone. I really believe, and again, I am not taking any glory. I have been in training for a long time. I did not always pray over my dreams like this, but you are getting the benefit of what it took me years to learn.
If I did not pray that prayer, I would never have heard from the person. I prayed the prayer, and God honored the prayer, and He made the person call me. He has such great works for us to do, but it must be in His mind. We cannot be making these judgments about what people need.
We must be constantly praying that He live through us, and that His will be manifested through us, and that He teach us every step of the way. When it is His mind living through us, we have the power to really help people. We are going to have such power to set people free if we could just overcome our pride enough.
I assure you, I promise you, that if you see a problem in somebody’s life, and your heart is right, that you really want to help them, you pray that prayer, like I said earlier, Lord, bless and help them, and if I could be of any help, show me how.
If you really pray that and, in your heart, you are not looking for glory, but you really want to manifest Christ, I promise you that He will come to you. Either He will give you a prayer for them, or they will come into your life in reality, and He will give you counsel for them. I promise you. Why? Because that is what He is training you for. That is why I could promise it to you. That is what He wants you to do.
The reason it is taking all of us so long to get to this level of ministry, this high level of ministry, is that a large part of the Church does not understand that they are even doing anything wrong when they pray with their own heart. They think they are Christ already. We are Christ, but the large percentage of the Church thinks they have the mind of Christ now.
This is the reality. We do have the mind of Christ, but for whatever reason, God set it up this way, I did not, it does not manifest in us unless we ask for it. If we do not ask for it, it is usually our satanic mind manifesting in us. All we have to do is say, Jesus, give me your mind, and boom, He does it.
What does that mean? He wants us to be actively aware that we have two minds, and that if we do not commune with Him, it is not so much that He will not give it if we do not ask for it, but He wants us to reach out for Him. He wants us to understand that right now, our mind is more Satan than it is Christ. It is just the truth.
Anybody hearing this tape, if you are shutting off the tape because you do not like what I am saying, what good are you doing yourself? It is the truth. We are all engraved with Satan, and we are in the process of being transferred over to the engraving of the Father, which will bring us into the shape of the Father. That is the way the Lord set it up.
When you reach out for Him, He will give you His mind. If you do not reach out for Him, it means that it is pride operating in you saying, I already have the mind of Christ. I do not need the counsel of Christ. I do not have to pray that prayer. I cast out demons or whatever your mind is telling you. If you think that you do not need the specific counsel of Christ at every specific instance, you are manifesting pride.
Jesus, Himself, who was in full stature said, I do not do anything unless I see my Father in Heaven do it. What did He mean? He means He did not do anything out of His natural mind. He only did what the mind of His Father, in Him, was doing. To find out what the mind of His Father was doing, He had to enter into that mind.
How do we access the mind of the Father? We access the mind of the Father by saying, Lord, let me access your mind. Let me enter in.
It is not the words. You can say any words you want. I had someone come to me who said, I cannot say your exact words. You do not have to say my exact words. I am giving you guidelines. Your heart must be turned towards the Lord. Your heart must be in submission to Christ. You are not a big shot. Jesus was in full stature, and He was not a big shot. He only did what His Father told Him to do. Are you any different?
As He brings us into this place that we could do it more and more, we are going to see mighty miracles, and we are going to be a blessing to mankind. We are on a long journey, and it is a battle. When the Scripture says, He who believes in me shall have everlasting life, if you look it up in the Greek, the Lord is really saying, He who believes into Me, into Me, if you believe into His mind. What it means is that he who enters into His mind and thinks with His mind, at some point, He is going to give us the authority to enter into His mind and stay there, and we shall have everlasting life. Praise the Lord.
I have a prayer life that is different from most people’s prayer life. I cannot pray, and I never could the way most people pray unless God anoints me. If someone asks me to pray for somebody, no matter what their problem is, unless a special anointing from the Lord comes upon me, my prayer is, Father, bless them, help them, deliver them, turn your face towards their problem. I do that in ten seconds. People that do not understand look at me, and they say, That is your prayer?
Here is my famous testimony. This goes back seven years ago. A lot of the women in the church that we went to were having their babies at home. I got a phone call around midnight when I was fast asleep. I got a phone call from one of the midwives that this sister in the church had, had her baby and the baby was well, but she could not pass the placenta. Usually, it is one more contraction, and you pass the placenta. They could not get the placenta out.
One of them said, The Lord said call Sheila. Will you pray? I said, Okay and I hung up the phone. By the time I got back to my bed, I had said, Lord, help her pass out the placenta. I was working at a secular job at that time, and I went back to sleep. Five or ten minutes later, the phone rang again and woke me up.
They thought I was down on my knees in some religious stature, binding and loosing and rebuking or whatever. I said, Hello, and they said, We just wanted to tell you, thank you for praying, and you can stop praying now, because the placenta was passed. I said, Oh, you are welcome. I hung up the phone and I went back to sleep. That is God’s honest truth. That was all that He gave me to do.
We are talking about all of this laborious prayer. Anyone hearing this tape, I am not knocking anybody or criticizing anybody, but what I am saying is that we can only function on the level where Jesus permits us to be. If you feel that the Lord is telling you to pray like that, you do it. What I am saying to you is that there is a greater way. We have talked about this.
The longer and the more laborious the prayer that is required to help somebody, the less people we can help. Why? Because we are human, and it drains our human strength. As we mature in Christ, our prayers should require less and less and less. From what you described to me, I believe the Lord is bringing you into a higher realm of prayer. He is closing up your mind and your voice that you cannot pray these prayers anymore. That is all that I pray. Bless him, save him, help him, love him and then, sometimes, God comes back to me and He will give me a deeper prayer to break through.
That is only under His anointing. I will only do it under His specific instruction. I can tell when that anointing is on me, because if it is not on me, it is a labor. It is unpleasant praying, and the words are dry, and they are just repetitive, and I know it is not God.
COMMENT: Pastor Vitale, what I believe you are saying is the Lord is taking you to a deeper realm of faith. Faith just says, Well, Lord, you do it. Then whatever He gives you, that is what you pray.
PASTOR VITALE: Yes. I do not want anyone hearing this tape and thinking I am exalting myself. I am not. I am sharing my experiences with you, because He wants to bring you there also. I heard a testimony, and I do not remember the name of the evangelist, but he was supposed to be a man of God that had many meetings. He was a very well-known man of God.
There was a whole family that was suffering from some torturous form of skin disease that was itching them. Nobody could help them. No doctor could help them, no man of God could help them, and they went into this evangelist’s meeting. They were desperate.
The whole family had this on them, about five or six people. The head of the family wrote a note and spoke to one of the ushers saying, We are desperate. Please bring this up to the pulpit and tell him we are desperate. I honestly cannot remember the name of the man of God. They said that he opened the note, read it, and put it down on the pulpit slapping the paper. He simply said, Lord, help him. The people walked out of there totally healed.
The labor is not in the flesh. The parable or symbology is if you have to labor in the flesh for hours, whether it is in prayer or in deliverance, you are working with a dull knife. That does not mean, if God has not sharpened your knife yet that you are not to do it. You do it. If you are hearing this tape, and you have a dull knife, keep on doing it, but pray that God will sharpen your knife, because there is a better way.
COMMENT: Does that mean that they were praying out of carnality?
PASTOR VITALE: I think they were doing the best that they could do. Yes, they were praying out of carnality. If they were praying out of Christ, it would have been done. I am trying so hard to be careful that people should not hear this tape and be condemned. If we are carnal, we are carnal.
We cannot be praying out of the Spirit until we get there. We have to grow up into it. We have to be developed into it. Our knife has to be sharpened into it. Only Christ can do that. Only Jesus Christ can do that.
If you have a two-year old in your family and a twenty-year old, and your two-year old cannot do what their older brother does, what do you tell them? Do not feel bad, Johnny, when you grow up you will do it too. There is no condemnation in what I am saying. We must grow up in Christ, but how are you going to grow up if there is no preacher telling you that there is something higher? You have to hear it, and if anyone is hearing this tape, and you are upset, you need deliverance and your pride is manifesting.
COMMENT: I believe what you are saying is that those of us who have not reached that point have to constantly cry out to be delivered of all carnality, so the Spirit of God can take over.
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, but it is more than being delivered of carnality. It is a simultaneous process of being delivered of carnality and Christ increasing in you. The strength, and the power, and the life, and the resurrection is in Christ, but He is not going to come forth until the carnality goes. We must give the glory to the Lord.
When I was in deliverance, I heard it preached that you keep getting delivered, and you keep getting delivered, and you keep getting delivered, and then you do not die anymore. No, that is not true. That is a lie. Jesus Christ is our life. He is our life. We stop dying when He grows up to full stature in us. Deliverance is just a procedure that empties us out of carnality so that He can grow.
It is likened to growing a seed in a garden. You have to turn over the earth, and you have to rip up the weeds and the stones, but our life is in Christ. We must be very careful to not deny Him what He deserves. He deserves the glory.
Although deliverance is a wonderful ministry, and I pray it myself, we must be careful to not idolize the deliverance ministry, because all glory is in Christ. We are just men, and men always want to take the glory. It is just part of our being human.
It is like you having your two-year old spilling juice on your rug. You just clean it up, but when your thirty-year old spills juice on your rug, you are mad. We have to accept who we are. Largely, the Church wants to believe they are mature. I see it throughout the Church and, of course, I know there are exceptions.
Largely, the Church wants to believe that they are mature in Christ, and they have all power and authority, and really we are babies. We are not going to get anywhere by denying our true spiritual age. We are just going to hinder our spiritual growth.
I am not against anybody. I am not criticizing anybody. You have to hear it, that you are not grown up in Christ. We are all babies in Christ. You have to hear it, so that you can at least pray about it. You have to hear the word. I am not knocking anybody.
COMMENT: In other words, what you are saying is that we must constantly cry out to be delivered and repent. What we are really doing is allowing Christ to be increased more in our life and us to be decreased so John 17 can be fulfilled in our life, that we will have that one in one.
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, exactly. That is what is happening. The doctrine that is being taught in the Church today, or although I understand that it is in ignorance, and the Lord just popped into my mind that Scripture in Acts where the apostle said to the Jews after Christ was raised. The Scripture says their heart was pricked, that they realized they had killed the Son of God. The apostle said, I know that you did it in ignorance, so repent, and partake of the blessing that God wants you to have.
The Church is in ignorance. I do not think very many, if any, are preaching error knowing that it is error. If they are, God have mercy on them. The Church is in ignorance by teaching the people that when you say the sinners prayer and even if you receive the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues, that is all there is. They say you have all the power, and all the wisdom, and all the knowledge, and all the authority, and when you die you are going to get a mansion.
It is funny, and it is okay that you are laughing, but for the person that believes it, it is very sad. Jesus Christ is strong enough to deliver every last child of His out of false doctrine. He is powerful enough to do it. The reality is that the Church is locked in a vicious spiritual warfare right now. They are locked in it, and it is very hard for anyone to be at a meeting like this.
You have to be called of God, because I am telling you the spiritual powers of anti-Christ that are manifesting through the visible five-fold ministry are so powerful, you could never be here if God did not bring you. You would have never made it if God did not bring you. These others have been around for many years, and they have had many experiences. You are very new. You could never be here.
If you do not know, I will tell you. I do not think you will mind me telling you that one of you ran away from me for several weeks. She was frightened, which is okay. Apparently, she prayed it through, and the Lord gave her a peace, and she is here.
There was somebody else that was present that was very upset that she did not come, because it was very obvious to me and this other person that God had called her here. We cannot hit her over the head with a baseball bat and put her in chains and bring her here. We cannot do that to people. You have to believe that if God really wants them here that He is going to bring them.
You cannot take this responsibility on yourself. It is going to kill you. You are here by a special call of God for someone of your physical age and of your spiritual age to be hearing this word. You have a very special blessing upon your life.
COMMENT: Is it possible that somewhere in my family line that there was a son of God from generations ago, because I come from a family line that is infested. I am serious. There are curses. There are a couple of born-again aunts who just got saved. I do not have the seed. If God has called me, He has planted the seed, but I do not come from a family line of Christians. You know, like with Solomon who came from David, and David came from a line that was special.
What I am trying to say is that in my family line there was nobody who ever came into it this deep. There are just curses in my family line. Is it possible that generations ago there was a son of God, and I was part of that?
PASTOR VITALE: I do not think it works that way, because we are all the spiritual seed of Christ. In this hour, the call is spiritual. For whatever God’s reason, the people that I know of that have the deepest call on their life usually have had very painful lives.
The way I perceive it, and I could be wrong, that in this hour God is bringing forth His sons, and He makes a judgment as to what natural family they are going to come through before they are born. Jesus said that He knew Jeremiah before he was born.
Before His sons are born, the Lord God knows what kind of family He is putting them into, what kind of life they are going to have, and everything that is going to happen to them. It just seems to me that the deeper the walk with the Lord you have, the harder your life has been.
I do not think it is a natural line, but since you said your family was infested, my family was infested too. God seems to be bringing us forth from infested earth, because the son of man must overcome. He must overcome.
You said your family is infested too. I think some families are more infested than others. As you look around, I see families that have had salvation on the family line for several generations, their lives are in order, and there is no rebellion in the family. The family structure is in order, everybody gets to school, they get their education, and everybody is healthy. They are financially blessed.
I see this a lot, especially in Baptist circles. Their lives are really in order, but these people have a lot of trouble receiving this message, because their life is so in order that they cannot believe that there is something that they do not know. It is a hindrance to them. God just makes us so desperate that we will be able to receive what He gives us. It was the same thing in Jesus’ day.
COMMENT: By this special call I have on my life, you mean I have that really deep, high call in the Spirit?
PASTOR VITALE: It looks that way to me. This is the midnight hour. The sons of God are going to stand up really soon. Everybody, to the best of my knowledge, that the Lord is touching with this message, and I do not know where else He is bringing it forth, you are called to stand up in full stature from the very beginning. You are called to it. Now, you have to work your way through.
Only God decides who actually is going to enter in, but if you are called to this ministry, and again I do not mean Living Epistles, to this spiritual ministry, you have the invitation. If you are sitting here, you have come to the wedding supper. All you have to do is eat. You have to eat. Praise the Lord.
COMMENT: What is the difference between night visions and dreams?
PASTOR VITALE: A night vision is a trance. There are three different kinds of trances. Peter had one where he went into a trance with his eyes open. Another kind of trance is with your eyes closed, and you think that you are sleeping, but it really is a night vision. What makes it a night vision or a trance is that you really enter into the realm of the Spirit. Your spiritual life enters into the realm of the Spirit, into that high place from which whatever takes place affects this world system that we are in.
For the moment I have forgotten the third kind of trance. We did go into that in the Daniel 7 series. I have the three kinds of trances on those tapes. A trance is where your spiritual substance literally enters into the realm of God’s Spirit, where whatever you do in that realm affects this world system.
Paul was caught up into the realm of the Spirit. John was caught up into the realm of the Spirit when he received the information for the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ. That was what happened to him. His spiritual being was caught up into the realm of God where He saw things that it was unlawful to utter. Then he descended back into this realm, and he wrote it in a book so that people could try to understand it. Did I make that clear?
COMMENT: Is there a feeling or anything associated with it?
PASTOR VITALE: There is no feeling. I cannot recall any feeling that I could describe to you. You would have to relate the dream. A dream would be a message given to you if it is from God. He would be imparting a message to you while you remain in the soul realm. In a night vision or a trance, you are permitted to come up and participate or partake of that realm. That is the difference.
We have a very interesting study in Daniel 7 where we go into that. It is where Daniel is asking the angel for more information about his dream. We see that the information comes in three stages. First, Daniel is speaking to the angel, and the angel is apart from him. In the second stage, it appears as if Daniel is answering his own questions, because the angel’s mind has entered into him. If you recall, there are Scriptures in Daniel which say, and the Spirit entered into him.
In the third stage, Daniel was actually caught up into the realm of the Spirit where the truth of God’s life is literally flowing through him. He becomes one with the truth of God’s life. What is happening to us is that we are headed for a place where this is not going to just happen temporarily. Ultimately, we are going to be caught up into the Spirit of God’s life and abide there. That is the promise of the Scripture. In the meantime, depending on where we are in our development and what God is doing in our life, we experience these things temporarily.
We are told in one of the prophets, Joel 2:28, that your old men will dream dreams.
Joel 2:28, And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. (KJV)
A lot of Christians think that you have to be a sixty or a seventy year old human male to dream dreams, but that is not the way it works. The way it works is that if you are dreaming dreams of God, it means you are an old man.
What does that mean? If you study it in the Hebrew, it means that you are spiritually male, and you have some measure of maturity, because God does not give the dreams of God or the visions of God to spiritual females or to spiritual babies.
We have to get an understanding of what these Scriptures mean. Glory to God. Of course, to be a spiritual male, to be a spiritual old man, and if you look that word up in the Hebrew, it means mature. It does not mean old. To be a mature spiritual male, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your human sex or your human age.
I am going to give you an occult-type example. Just for anyone listening to this tape or reading this transcript, I do not believe in reincarnation, but it is the counterfeit of what God is doing. If you know anything about reincarnation, you will hear them say, Oh, this one is an old soul. It means reincarnated many times and has had many experiences in the world. It is an old soul. They could be talking about a little child.
In the Spirit of God, Christ is incarnating many times. Christ is having many experiences. Each experience, each lifetime that He experiences is in a different human body and human soul, but it is Christ that is manifesting many times unto His maturity.
There are different manifestations of Christ’s personality. He is increasing in the earth. There are aspects of His personality that He is experiencing or has experienced more than other aspects of His personality. As the numbers of humanity increase, Christ is experiencing many more experiences at the same time. Can you hear this? Are you with me?
There are certain aspects of His personality that I am not even sure of what they are. The Father God decided when there were only two people in the earth, I want him to start learning this, and He has been experiencing certain things since the beginning of time. The Father God kept increasing his experiences.
If you are an old man, you are a manifestation of Christ that has been in the earth from the beginning of the creation, from the foundation of the earth. Let me say it again. Christ is incarnating many times in many personalities, in many bodies. It is the will of the Father that Christ shall experience life in the flesh, shall experience sin, and shall be raised from the dead.
As the number of human beings increase on the earth, Christ is having many increased experiences. There is only one example I can think of to give you of certain experiences. I ask that you give me another example, Father. For example, Christ appeared in the earth in the man, Elijah. Elijah did certain things. Christ appeared in the earth as the man, John the Baptist. He did the same type of things in John the Baptist as He did in Elijah. That aspect of Christ’s training, that aspect of Christ’s development, He has been experiencing many more times than another aspect of His development. I do not have an example to give you right now. You all understand?
COMMENT: In other words, occult people may be getting the message from the Cain part, and they are spreading that, and saying they were here six thousand years ago. They are taking that same spirit of a type of a man that was then and making it seem like they are that old.
PASTOR VITALE: Exactly. Tell me if this is right. I think that what you are saying, and this is what I believe the reality is, that the cults and those that believe in reincarnation, they are taking an individual like you and me and saying that our personality reincarnates many times.
The truth is that it is Christ that incarnates many times. The soul realm, as always, which is the mere image, has it backwards. They know that there is a multiple incarnation, but they think it is the soul, but it is not. It is Christ. They are looking at it backwards. Is that what you were saying?
COMMENT: I was thinking about Tape #60 that was talking about the Cain man that came upon Noah. That was the same spirit that Cain had. It took over, and I believe that is where, when it is not of God, it is of the enemy.
PASTOR VITALE: I see what you are saying. Yes, that is true. Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus, for that.
Just to finish off the point, if a person of God tells you that you are an old man or if you fill the qualifications of an old man, because you have dreams of God, this is what it means. It has to be dreams of God. They cannot be dreams of Satan.
What it means is that the Christ in you is experiencing something that the Father God has been giving Him to experience from the foundation of the earth or from way, way back. That is why it does not matter whether you are male or female or how old or young you are. It is Christ in you, bringing forth a certain manifestation of the Godhead in you. It is His choice, and it is not your choice, neither is it by your works.
Reincarnation says, You are purified by your works, and that you must have been wonderful in your last life to be a mature soul in this life.
No, no, no. It is Christ in you, Christ choosing you, Christ doing it, Christ being glorified. You are the servant. If you are taking any glory in this, you have a false doctrine. We are the garment that He is living in as He matures through the earth.
COMMENT: Some girl told me a number of years back that she believes, before the Lord comes, that was her words, that God is going to give little children in mother’s arms or father’s arms, prophesy, and that they will be speaking that. Do you think that was of God?
PASTOR VITALE: No. I think that the Church is carnal, and they read the Scriptures that talk about little children, they think it means natural children, but it does not. The children are the Christ child that is being formed in us. The little children are those believers who are pregnant with Christ. Every believer is not pregnant with Christ.
Someone told me that they were in a church service one Sunday morning, and the pastor made an announcement to the church that God had just spoken to him to let the children pray. I love this man, this particular pastor, who is very prophetic. He called all the human children up to pray. God did not mean that.
God meant, This Sunday I do not want you having a prayer line with everybody waiting for you to pray for them. I want you to let those believers who are pregnant with Christ, in whom Christ is being formed, for they are the children. Let the members of the congregation practice. Let them pray. He called up the human children because they do not understand.
COMMENT: Likewise, in the Scripture when Jesus was talking to the apostles, Let the children come, was He really speaking about the new ones in Christ and also that same Scripture, when it says that if you teach error to a little child, it would be better that a noose be put around you, that you be let down into the depths of the sea. Is God talking about one of His young children in Christ?
PASTOR VITALE: In the actual Scripture where Jesus said, Forbid not the children to come unto me, I think it was natural children, but it was just an example. When Jesus talks about the children of the Kingdom, He is talking about us. He is having a baby. The Father God is reproducing Himself. He is having a baby.
As a matter of fact, He is having a many-membered baby. We are all pregnant with Christ. I hope all of us here are pregnant with Christ. Many in the Church world are pregnant with Christ, and the babies in utero or the many-membered babies are the children of the Kingdom. We are God’s children. We hear a lot of Christians saying that we are God’s children, but they do not understand what they are saying.
Brethren, you are only God’s child if His Life is being formed in you. I am not talking about having received the Holy Spirit or talking in tongues. The purpose of the Holy Spirit is to impregnate you with Christ. If you are not impregnated with Christ, you are none of His. I am sorry. I am telling you the truth. We are the children of the Kingdom.
As you said, I just ask God to have mercy on all of these preachers that are not only preaching false doctrine, but the ones that would come against a word like this and cut the people off from it. I have a few people in mind, may God have mercy on their souls. Then again, the Scripture says, the offense must come. It has to be this way. It is prophesied, But woe be unto them, by whom the offense comes. I just put my head down, and I do not do anything.
COMMENT: Is that the same thing in the Bible when it talks about I will plant my seed, when God says, I will plant my seed in every believer? Does it mean that we are pregnant with Christ?
PASTOR VITALE: I am not familiar with that Scripture. Are you talking about New Testament or Old Testament?
COMMENT: I am not sure. I just wanted to know what it says about the seed, about being pregnant with God’s seed.
PASTOR VITALE: There is a Scripture in the Old Testament that says, I will sow my seed in the hearts of men and beasts. It is in one of the prophets. What it is talking about is He is going to sow His seed in our corporate being. You know we are living inside an animal body, and our humanity is a man. He is going to sow His seed among man and beast.
The seed is this Word that is coming forth from Christ in me. The seed is likened to the seed of a human male. Our minds, the minds of the human beings, are likened to a woman’s fertile parts in her ovarian eggs. The male seed is the Word of God being preached by Christ in a preacher. If I am preaching to you out of my adamic heart, it is in vain, my preaching is in vain. Your sitting here submitting to it is in vain. If I am preaching to you out of my adamic heart, all that this seed can bring forth is adam, which is ruled by Satan.
This is what Paul was talking about when he said, Knowledge puffs up. If I am preaching to you out of my adamic heart, you may be able to walk away with knowledge, and it will surely puff you up. If I am preaching to you out of Christ in me, it will bring forth Christ in you, which brings forth humility and life. That is what He meant when He said, By their fruit you shall know them. We will see what kind of fruit comes forth in you as a result of sitting under this spiritual ministry. We will see what tree is preaching out of me.
There are two trees. Either adam is growing in you, or Christ is growing in you. The point is that the way Christ is being formed in men is that human beings are the female seed or the spiritual ovum, and the words that I speak are spiritual seed, and they just flow over you and flow over you as often as you submit yourself to it. Hopefully, you are going to get pregnant.
If you are pregnant, then these words become the spiritual food of the Christ that is being formed in you. That is why, to get this, or to get anything that God is offering, although there are always exceptions, sometimes God does it very quickly, you have to submit yourself to a ministry.
I know when I went to that deliverance ministry, a lot of people would come in and want a heavy deliverance right away, and the minister would say to them, if they were disappointed that they did not get delivered of everything in one night, he would say, Start coming to the meetings. Submit yourself to the ministry and let the anointing flow over you. You have to be penetrated. We must be penetrated.
Some people get very upset at this word, especially if they are men. I am sorry but, spiritually, you are female, and if you want to inherit everlasting life, you must be penetrated by the Christ. The way you are penetrated is by this word coming forth from Christ. It has to be coming forth from Christ in me.
There is also such a thing as an imputed anointing, which I believe is what happened in the church where I was penetrated. I do not believe that man was preaching out of Christ, and I do not say this to knock him.
I just do not believe he was in that place, but the Father visited him when he preached, and there was such a powerful outpouring that the Lord was present even though His words were coming from his adamic heart. The presence of the Lord was there, outside of him, that I and whoever else were penetrated.
As I understand the Scripture, once God raises up preachers who Christ is preaching through, He is going to start to shut down the preachers that are preaching out of their adamic heart. This is the whole principle of the manifestations of the sons of God. When they stand up in full stature, all of the teaching will be put down.
Any man that is teaching out of his adamic heart, no matter how knowledgeable he is, will be shut down. Why? Because the only power of that seed is to reproduce itself, which is adam, who is ruled by Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind. The whole purpose of this thing is not to get us to heaven, but to have Christ reproduced in us.
A lot of Christians say that they are in the image of God, but this is a real easy one. Just look it up in your concordance and find out what image means. Research it. Look it up in your concordance and look it up in your dictionary. To be in the likeness of God means to be made out of what He is made out of. God is Spirit. We are spirit. We are in the likeness of God, but to be in the image of God, it is right there in your reference books. It means an exact duplicate, an exact duplicate.
You look at the Church today. Look at me. I am not an exact duplicate of Christ. We are not in His image. We are not in His image. It is a lie. You have received a lie if you believe that. I am not knocking you or putting you down. The truth is going to set you free. It is a lie. We are not in His image. We are in Satan’s image. That is the truth.
In the world, we have something called cloning, which is a nightmare to the human mind. You see in the science fiction, they are going to make clones. Everybody is going to be exactly the same in our humanity. How terrible, no personality of your own, no individual thought. When man does it, it is a nightmare, but when Jesus does it, it is going to be glorious when each one of us is an exact duplicate without any variation of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He will be flowing by His Spirit through all of us, but He is so mighty that He has so many different aspects to His character that we will not all be exactly the same. He will be revealing a different aspect of His character through each of us.
We shall be like an orchestra, many different instruments, and each instrument not necessarily even playing the same thing. One will be playing harmony, one playing melody, one playing bass, but when you hear us together, we shall be making one sound. It will be the sound of many waters. There will be many of us, but all together we will be making one harmonious sound.
The mind of man gets very frightened, because when man does it, it is terrible. When God does it, it is more glorious than the very best that this human life can offer to us. Glory to God.
Jesus was God’s seed that impregnated Mary. When the Holy Spirit hovered over Mary, two things happened. By the authority of God, she conceived without having known a man. That Holy Thing which she conceived was a child that was conceived with a fertilized human spirit. It was the Life of God. Did I make that clear?
She conceived a natural child, and that natural child had a human spirit which contained the Life of the Father. It was fertilized, and it had potential. Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born with the potential for Christ to rise up in Him.
In this day and hour, we are born natural people. We have to have an experience with God, we go through a series of experiences, we receive the Holy Ghost and, Lord willing, the Holy Ghost penetrates us, and Christ begins to be formed in us.
Jesus was born in that condition. He was born in that condition. He was born into a natural line, so He had this Holy Thing, the Logos, the Life of the Father in the same human vessel that He inherited from His mother. He inherited a body and a human soul from His mother. He was born with the soul of Christ, the potential for the fullness of the Life of the Father.
This is a very important word. I guess the Lord wants me to go over it.
Because He had a soul from His mother and a body from His mother, He inherited whatever sin was on that family line. Do not shut off the tape if this is the first tape you are hearing. Do not shut off the tape. Just use your intelligence. Pray about it. Even Israel had a covenant with God, which justified them before God, but they were still fallen men. There had to be sin on their line, because God had a whole series of laws as to who you stoned to death for what sin. They were part of the fallen creation, but they had been offered a covenant with God that would justify them.
What does that mean? Justification gives us the privilege of having a relationship with God. He said, If you follow these laws, I will let you come near to me without that nearness causing you to die, because I am a righteous God. When sin comes near to Me, I destroy it, but you keep these rules and regulations and you can have a relationship with Me.
Compared to the rest of the world in that hour, Israel and the descendants of Abraham had a minimum of sin on their line, because they were living righteously, or if they were not, God received their sacrifice.
Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born a man. The Scripture clearly states that He was a human man. He inherited whatever sin was on that family line. I repeat to you, if He never said a wrong word, or if He never did a wrong deed, sin is in the mind. It is our state of being.
COMMENT: Being that the Scripture says that Jesus was a sinless lamb from the foundation of the world, and God allowed that sin nature to be in Him to show us how much more of a struggle He had, because everybody thought He did not have to fight anything because He was just God? This way, He had the God man and man in Him. The struggle was that much harder that He overcame sin?
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, it was much harder than the way we are going now. He was a natural man that was born with sin, but also born with the spiritual weapons that have now been imparted to us. He was raised up in a Hebrew household, and He was instructed in the Scriptures.
He had a relationship with the Father from the beginning, and He was taught of God, because there was no one else who knew what He knew. He received the information that He had to rise up and live out of the Christ in Him and overcome His inherited sin and purify it. He did it. He did it. When He was baptized in the Jordan by John, we see the Holy Spirit descending as a dove, and I remind you of the Scripture,
John 1:33, where John says, He who that called me and told me to baptize said, the one upon whom the Spirit abides, He is the one. (KJV)
I declare to you that Jesus Christ stood up in full stature at the time of water baptism.
Up until that point, He was struggling with His inherited sin nature, rebuking it, crushing it, and treading it down. When He was baptized, that full stature anointing came upon Him, and it says that the Spirit took Him up into the wilderness, and He was tempted by the demons, and He was tempted by the devil.
I want to tell you something, brethren, the Scripture says that for forty days He was tempted, and I do not doubt that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was tempted for forty days. Forty is the number of generation, and I declare to you that He is still being tempted in you and in me, and He is still overcoming in this generation of Christ, which has no time barrier. There is a generation of Christ. We are the 42nd generation, and every offspring of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the 42nd generation, the second generation of Christ, has many names.
We are a generation, and there is a Scripture that says, and His seed was given to Him for a generation. Whoever is of the seed of Christ makes up a generation. That is in the prophets, if you want that Scripture. He is still being tempted of the devil, and He is still overcoming, and He is still purifying His natural soul from sin, and He is still being crucified, and He is still being resurrected from the dead.
COMMENT: What would it mean when Jesus said from the cross, It is finished?
PASTOR VITALE: What happened when Jesus was on the cross was that the God in Him was joined to His adamic soul. His adamic soul was slain through the joining. He had two souls. One of the titles of Jesus Christ is the nail.
In the Book of Judges, Chapter 4:21, He is typified by the nail that was put through Sisera’s head, which typified the carnal mind.
Judges 4:21: Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and heavy. So he died. (KJV)
Jesus Christ penetrated His adamic soul, slaying the enmity in His flesh, and of the twain making one New Man. What He meant when He said that it was done, that for the first time in the history of mankind, Satan was slain in the mind of one man.
Because He was raised from the dead we, too, shall be raised from the dead, because when He succeeded in slaying the enmity in His flesh, and joining them and becoming one new man, even the creation of God, the Father raised Him from the dead.
That overcoming life is now in you and in me. Because it happened in one man, it is just a matter of time for it to filter down through the whole creation. When He said it was finished, He said, It was finished in the Head. He was saying, I did it, and now it is just a matter of time and it is going to take over the whole world. Glory to God.
The whole world saw Him hanging on a cross, but it was not His red blood that fell down on the ground that saved. People, do not be religious with me. What good is His red blood falling down on the ground doing you? What good could that red blood do for you? No, no. His blood is His life. The life of the flesh is in the blood for the soul realm. It is the life of His Spirit which is keeping you alive.
He was resurrected from the dead and ascended back to the realm of the Father, and He is sprinkling upon all mankind. He is pouring Himself out of His Spirit upon all mankind, and a drop of His Life is in you. Because a drop of that resurrected Life is in you, He is going to do to your soul what He did to the soul of the man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Alleluia!
We have to see this thing as it is. It is so glorious. There is a Scripture that says He had to be crucified so that men would believe. That is why our bodies do not have to be crucified, because it was not necessary for His body to be crucified. His soul had to be crucified, but the Father crucified His body so that this Bible could be written, so that men could believe on whatever level they are capable of believing on from the beginning. It was done so that faith could be built in them, so that they could receive the Holy Ghost, so that they could draw nigh unto Christ, and eventually under the direction of the Lord, come to this deep understanding.
The human body of Jesus Christ of Nazareth was crucified so that men would believe, not so that the creation could be saved. If you look it up when it says, He died, it was His soul life that died. It was not His spiritual life that died. It was His soul life that died, and He gave up that soul life so that He could return to Spirit and pour out on all of us, because we do not have the strength to do it. He had to return to Spirit form to do that.
COMMENT: Before Christ was crucified, before He was born, that was impossible. It only became possible after He died on the cross?
PASTOR VITALE: I see what you are saying. What happened was that the spirit that was resurrected is the Spirit of Adoption. Before He was crucified, if the Spirit of the Father was poured out on everybody, it would kill us because it would judge the sin in us, and it would kill us. The Life of the overcoming, resurrected Son is the mediator, the only mediator between God and man. When the spiritually resurrected Life of the Son is poured out on you, the Spirit of the Father will not kill you when it sees sin, but His Life will purify you.
COMMENT: Because His blood is covering me, is that what you are saying?
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, because when the Father sees the blood, He is passing over you because He sees the first fruits of the resurrected creation in you. You are justified and the Father will not kill you because of your sin.
COMMENT: Because Christ died for me on the cross?
PASTOR VITALE: Not only because He did that. There are people dying all over the place that Christ died for. Because His life is inside of you, purifying you, sanctifying you, the Father will pass over you, and He will not kill you because of your sin. We are rapidly approaching the time in the plan of God where the Father is going to stop passing over sin.
We must use this Life that is in us to purify ourself from our sins, because the hour is coming when the Father is going to stop passing over. Those who have been purified shall enter into the kingdom of God, and those who have not been purified are going to lose whatever gift of the Spirit they have and be lumped with the heathen.
COMMENT: I am trying to understand a little bit. When Christ came, and He died on the cross, what was His purpose again?
PASTOR VITALE: His physical death was so men could believe. If the only thing that happened to Him, which is the most important, was that the spiritual Life of the Father slew the enmity in His flesh, and of the twain making one New Man, He no longer had two souls. Now, He had one soul. Who would know that He did it? No one would know that He did it.
Because men are carnal, the Father crucified His body, and raised His body from the dead. The Father said, I will show you to five hundred witnesses. I raised His body from the dead, but that was of no benefit to anybody.
COMMENT: I guess I was taught in the Church world that He came and died on the cross to save us. What was the reality?
PASTOR VITALE: The reality of it is that His soul life died, and the Father raised His soul life from the dead, and brought Him back to spiritual form. That resurrected soul life is now in you, purifying you from sin. His physical body is not in you purifying you from sin.
COMMENT: Before He came and died, this was impossible?
PASTOR VITALE: It was possible, but God would have had to do what He did with Jesus Christ of Nazareth in every individual. It just was not practical. Of course, with Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the things that He inherited from His mother were at a minimum, because Israel had been under a covenant with God for a couple of thousands of years. If He wanted to save the whole world, at that rate it would have taken Him billions of years.
What He did, He did with one man, and He is giving His victory to whoever wants it. It has only been two thousand years. Over these next thousand years, which would make it three thousand years, He is going to be saving the whole world. It could have been done before, but this was God’s shortcut.
COMMENT: Is that what it means in the Scripture where it says that He took the sins of the whole world upon Himself.
PASTOR VITALE: He was made to be sin. He was incarnated in the form of sinful man. The Scripture says that He was incarnated as sinful flesh, but they deny that He had sin at the beginning. They say He was incarnated as sinful flesh, but without sin. That is true, but at the beginning it was sinful. He purified it. He purified it. He was born as that Holy Thing of the Father.
The Christ never sinned, but the Christ was born in a human being that was sin, and the power of the Christ purified the sin that He inherited from His mother.
I have had a couple of people call me on this recently. One woman was Catholic, and she was very upset. I said to her, Can you deny that His mother had sin? What do we do with the sin? She said, Mary was perfect. I said, Oh no, she was not. That is the Roman Catholic answer, but I want to tell you, I do not know of any other denomination that has addressed the problem. I do not agree with the Roman Catholic solution, but I do not know any other Christian or any other denomination that has addressed the problem of how could Jesus be without sin when He was born of a sin-filled woman?
Let us look at the problem. If you do want to believe that Mary was perfect, which I do not believe, and if she was perfect, how did she get perfect? How did it happen? Where did this perfection come from? I give you a suggestion. It is what I just preached to you. If you have a better suggestion, let me hear of it.
COMMENT: They call Mary the Immaculate Conception, but Jesus was really the Immaculate Conception. She was conceived with sin.
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, she was conceived with sin. Jesus’ Father was God. He received no sin from God, but He had a mother and a Father, and His mother had sin. That means He had sin. He had the fallen nature. Maybe people will not get that upset if I say it that way. He had the fallen nature. He was born with it.
If we could just get past our carnal mind, this is so exciting. I just heard the Scripture, Because He lives, we too live. Nobody knows what it means. If He was born in the condition that we are in now, and He overcame, and rose from the dead, we are going to do it too. It is so exciting. This false doctrine is killing us.
COMMENT: I feel that it is just absolutely beautiful that Jesus did have the sin nature. What a struggle He must have gone through as a child, the rebuke He took from His family, and all the things He took from everybody, but yet He sinned not. It must have been a struggle like when He went into the wilderness to be tempted for forty days and He overcame it.
That must have been a tremendous challenge, because He was coming into that place where He would have the resurrection of His old adamic nature coming at a spiritual nature. It must have been more of a struggle for Him than it was for us; therefore, we know we can do it too.
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, and He was totally alone. I have to tell you that I am not really convinced that He did not sin as a child. The Scripture says He was the Lamb without spot. At the time of the crucifixion, He was the Lamb without spot. We are told in the Book of Romans that He brought His adamic soul into submission to the Spirit of Holiness.
If He inherited His sin nature from His mother, it really does not make any difference whether He sinned because He was sin. Do you understand? He inherited the sin. I really believe that He was just as human as we are, and that it was back and forth, and back and forth, just like we are, until by the grace of God, He overcame.
My personal feeling is that He probably did do a few things that were sin, because He was just a man. He was in the same condition that we are in now. He was a man with Scriptural teaching, and with the Christ being formed in Him. That Christ overcame sin.
Now I look at the Scripture, and I see that they say that He was in the synagogue. They said, What do you mean by He is the Son of God? Is not Joseph and Mary His parents? There was nothing different about this child as He was growing up that made His neighbors think there was anything different about Him. I think He was just like we are until He was caught up to full stature at the baptism.
COMMENT: Did you say He had the seed of the Father?
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, He had the seed of the Father. He had a soul of the Father, and a soul that He inherited from Mary.
COMMENT: I would think the soul of the Father would be over what was from her.
PASTOR VITALE: Why is it not overcoming everything in you? It had to grow up in Him.
COMMENT: I did not have the seed of the Father to begin with like He did.
PASTOR VITALE: I believe He was born with it in seed form. We are told that He brought the sin in Him into submission to the Spirit of Holiness. He had a battle, and if He was battling continuously with the soul that He got from His mother, I do not see any problem with Him being a very human person from time to time.
COMMENT: That is going to be hard for us to really accept. Yet, I am thinking of the Scripture where Jesus says, Satan can find no place in me.
PASTOR VITALE: That was after He was raised up to full stature. I understand that this is a big problem for people because at first hearing they think it is blaspheme, but I believe that all of those scriptures about Him being a Lamb without spot, and Satan having nothing in Him, all refer to Him after He was caught up to full stature.
Because Jesus inherited His mother’s sin nature, and the conflict of the ages was taking place in Him from the beginning, from an infant, one month old, two months old, three months old, surely He must have yielded to some sort of anger or temper tantrum. He was a human child.
As He grew in wisdom and in grace, the Life of God grew in Him and, eventually, brought His adamic soul into submission. I believe that this is not blaspheme, that it is the truth of the Scripture, that He was a natural man who was born with a fertilized human spirit, and that He overcame that adamic soul, and purified it so that when He was crucified, the Father raised Him from the dead. He did it in the man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and He is doing it today in the second generation of Christ, which we are.
Of course, concerning the Scripture that I just mentioned, Jesus grew in wisdom and in grace. We know that He had the spirit without measure as an adult. Wisdom and grace are qualities of the spirit. How could He grow and increase in wisdom and grace if He had the spirit without measure as a child? Glory to God.
We just lost a few minutes on the tape, so we are going to try and redo it. The Scripture is, He learned obedience by the things that He suffered. The Church world will tell you that He suffered on the cross, and He learned obedience. I guess they are saying that because He went to the cross, He learned obedience. What they are using are those Scriptures that say, He was in the garden, and He agonized and He sweat blood, and that He really did not want to go, but He did what the Father told Him, and He learned obedience.
We know from a recent message that, that is not true. He was not afraid to go on the cross. Neither was He petitioning His Father for permission to not go. That is a false interpretation of those Scriptures. He never hesitated, never looked to the left, never looked to the right. He never wavered, and He never feared. He was never anxious about what was about to come upon Him. That is all a wrong interpretation of the Scripture.
Jesus went willingly and directly to the cross. He had a revelation that He had two souls, that the Christ in Him was about to slay the enmity in His flesh, and that when He overcame, that all of mankind was being saved through His overcoming. He never wavered or was afraid for a second.
If this is true, then what sufferings did He learn obedience from? We know He suffered on the cross, but if He was obedient to the point that He went right up to the cross, then how could His suffering on the cross teach Him obedience? It had to come through His sufferings during His natural life up until the point of His baptism, where He was struggling to live out of His Christ soul and not out of His adamic soul. It is the same overcoming struggle we battle today.
We are told in the Gospels He struggled with Satan. Satan tried to tempt Him, and He refused to obey Satan. He refused to follow the dictates of His adamic soul, and He brought that soul into submission. The Scripture says that His adamic soul was down in the bottomless pit and chained by Christ. He stayed there as of the time that He was caught up to full stature. That was His condition, and on the cross He killed Satan. He killed Satan, and of the twain He made one New Man.
He killed adam, which is ruled by Satan, and of the twain He made one New Man, utterly destroying the sin nature that He inherited from His mother. The Father raised Him from the dead, and because He lives, we too shall live. That same overcoming spiritual life of Christ is dwelling in us, and He intends to slay the enmity in our flesh, and of the twain make one New Man. Glory to God.
Do not panic and do not shut off the tape. Just pray about it. I know it is shocking, but all of the scriptures that say He was the Lamb without spot and that Satan had nothing in Him, this was all after He was caught up to full stature. The truth is we know very little about His life before He was caught up to full stature. We just know that He was found studying with the rabbis. He knew at twelve years old that He was called. He caused His parents a lot of anxiety by not telling them where He was going. That could be looked upon as sin. He caused His parents hurt.
COMMENT: When Mary asked Him after she found Him, Why have you done this? He said, Did you not know I had to be about my Father’s business?
PASTOR VITALE: He was obeying God rather than man, but He could have been more sensitive to His mother about it. Right?
As I understand the Scripture, they left the area, and they were with their caravan all the way out on their trip, and they had to turn around and go back for Him again. I am sorry, but that is not perfection. It was a little bit short of perfection. Yes, He had to obey God, and study with the masters, but I believe that if He was in perfection, He would have gone to His parents and said, Look, I have to be there. Please do not be concerned, do not worry, and certainly do not take the caravan a whole day of traveling out and have to come back for me. The Scripture is not really clear, but I would expect His parents were in great distress to have their son missing like that. Although He did not mean to do it, His behavior caused anxiety in His parents, and that is sin.
I mean that is the way we sin. We are all living for God here. We are not blatantly going out and sinning. We are justified before God, but sometimes we are not particularly considerate, or we do not think of how other people would feel. Basically, if we are living for God, that is the only kind of sin that we are in. We have given up almost everything else. Right?
I am not saying Jesus was bad. I am saying He was human, and that His sin was of a human nature. He was human. He was human. The Church world will tell you He was human, but they just do not get the drift of it. They do not understand what happened. I do not know about you, but I am more excited about the fact that He was human, that God purified His soul, and brought Him to a condition where He was God.
That is more exciting, because it can relate to me more than to hear a message that God took on the flesh, He was born as God, and they killed Him on the cross, because Jehovah is a blood-thirsty God, who needed a blood sacrifice.
He let Jesus live for thirty-three and a half years, and He let them slaughter Him. Jehovah is not a blood-thirsty God, and He does not need an animal sacrifice in that way. The animal sacrifice that He is requiring, brethren, is our soul. He does require a sacrifice, but it is a spiritual sacrifice.
Remember, everything that is in the natural is an example. To use the example of the sacrifice that Jehovah wanted was an animal, a goat, or a bull, and that in the New Covenant, in the spiritual, He wants a human man as a sacrifice is not rational. Just use your intelligence of what you know. If you are mature in the Scriptures at all, this makes no sense at all.
First it was a natural sacrifice, and now He wants a spiritual sacrifice. What good is the body of Jesus Christ of Nazareth going to do Him?
The true sacrifice was Jesus Christ of Nazareth’s adamic soul. The soul life, if you study it out in the scriptures, is called the animal life. It is the life of the flesh. We are in an animal body, but the fallen soul life is an animal. He is the beast. The spiritual sacrifice the Father God wants from each of us is our own soul, and that is what He took from Jesus Christ of Nazareth. We start by taking dominion over it, fighting with it, refusing to let it sin through us.
The next stage is that it goes down under our feet. Paul said, The Father shall shortly bruise Satan under your feet. That is full stature. When he is under our feet, he is locked in the bottomless pit. He is chained by Christ. Paul said, I wear these chains, and they are Christ. His natural man was chained up. Satan in Paul was in the bottomless pit.
The final stage is that Christ will slay the beast in the bottomless pit, which is Satan. That is the lightning coming down from heaven. He is going to be released from the pit one last time. He is going to go up on the breath of the earth, which is our carnal mind, and he is going to try and tempt us and get his dominion back, and lightning came down from heaven. The spiritual man in us destroyed him. That is the procedure.
Let me just pray. Father, if there is any easier way you can give me to bring this message across that will not get people hysterical when they hear me saying that Jesus sinned before He was raised up to full stature, just teach me, Lord, how to bring it forth to them. I just pray that you deal with their fears, their understandable fears, and that you cast down all false doctrine, and let only the truth remain in every preacher on the face of the earth, including me. If it is false, just take it down, Lord, and prove it wrong, but if it is of you, Father, magnify it and increase it, and let all men be encouraged, dear God, that there is something much better than going to some fantasy heaven and walking on streets of gold and living in a mansion.
Look at the selfishness in your belief, people. Look at what you believe. You are glorifying yourself when the true message of the gospel is that Christ should appear in us, that our own soul must die, decrease, that He can live through us, and be glorified through us. He wants to work His works through us, His power, His glory, His mercy, working it through us right here, heaven on the earth, in that His life is flowing through us. As a result of this, the whole face of the earth is going to be converted from hell into heaven, and all shall be saved. We just thank you Father.
One last comment before we close. It has been called to my attention that there are some people preaching that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was a natural man who overcame simply as a natural man who evolved into a higher plane.
I want to avoid anybody thinking that is what I am preaching. Jesus Christ was God incarnate. God incarnated inside of a human being that had a human body and a human soul. By the power of His Godhead, He brought the sin-filled soul into submission. Therefore, because He was without sin, the Lamb without spot at the time of the crucifixion, His Father raised Him from the dead. Jesus Christ of Nazareth was God incarnate.
