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Praise the Lord, I hope you will bear with me. I am still half asleep, but we will see what the Lord has for you today. I have much to tell you. The Lord has given me a very exciting message, but I am waiting for Him to move upon me to indicate what part of it He wants you to hear right now, and I think this is one of the most exciting things about God. Wherever He sends an ambassador, He has a message especially for you, especially for this fellowship, and, sometimes, especially for individuals here.
The message of the Lord, in this hour, to His church is that it is time for the resurrection of the dead. The problem is that some of us do not know who is dead. We are the dead ones, we are the dead ones, and we are spirit. We are spirit, and our spirit is expressed through a soul and body.
The tendency of people is to look at their bodies, and it walks, and it talks, and it has babies, and we think that we are alive. The Scripture says that when we were separated from God, at the time of the fall, we died. Our spirit died, and it was buried underneath our soul which is made out of earth. We see in the church world today a common teaching that the place of the dead is a place away from here, it is a place where we go when our body dies, but the truth is that our spirit died many thousands of years ago. Does the Scripture not say that we all died in Adam? In Adam, we all died.
When Adam died at the beginning of time, all of his potential offspring which we are, died in him, and when we died, we fell down to this place, we fell down to this planet, and our spirits are buried inside of these prison houses we call bodies. I am here today to tell you that these bodies which are capable of decaying and being mutilated and corrupted, these bodies are not the image of Almighty God. He has much better things for you than what happens in this flesh, and He has much better things for all of us than that which is happening on the surface of this planet right now.
Jesus told us, "Do not let your hearts be filled with fear when you see the whole world shaking, poverty here, famine there, war there, terrifying things happening all over the earth." He said, "Do not be afraid, because this is the sign." He said, "Look up, the secret thing is happening." Everybody is looking at the destruction, everybody is afraid that they are losing this planet, this place to live," and He said, "I tell you a mystery. While all of the unbelievers are looking at the circumstances of this world, in the secret place of my spirit, I am raising the human spirits of men from the dead."
This resurrection will cause a great shaking, not only of that which is happening outside of us, but this shaking will be in our own hearts, in our own souls, and in our own flesh. The shaking will be so severe that many who do not hear this message will think that their God has left them, that He has abandoned them. Education is very important, this message is very important, we must know how to cope with the travail that is coming upon us. The Scripture tells us that there is a birth coming forth, and it is coming forth from within us.
One of the problems the church is confronted with today is the false belief that many, if not all, of the promises of the Scripture have already happened to us. They have not. They are beginning to happen to us.
There is a spiritual labor that we are entering into in this hour. It is a travail of the spirit. That man-child of Revelation 12 must be born in us. You say that you are born again. Well, you have had a born-again experience, the first step in a series of events that will result in your dead human spirit truly being born again. When that birth is complete, you will be raised from the dead.
The big question is, who or what is being raised from the dead? The message is, your spirit is being raised from the dead. Christ in you, the hope of glory. First, Christ, the first fruits. That is your spirit. Then, those who are His at His coming, then your soul. He is starting deep inside of you, and He is working His way outward, and after that the end cometh, then He deals with this body.
There will be a great shaking, brethren. When this resurrection begins deep in your heart, your whole world will start to rock, and shake, and reel, and it will look like you are being destroyed. You will feel like you are being destroyed, and, in a sense, you are, but what is being destroyed is this old corrupt, moth-eaten life. What we see in the church today and in the world today are many believers who have had an experience with God, that had an experience with Jesus.
When we heard a lot of travailing in the spirit, we heard prophecy this morning. This is the spirit of God interacting with man giving you spiritual experiences, just letting you taste what it is like, because to have experience with God is a whole new experience. We are soul, and He is spirit, and it is a whole new realm that we are brought into, but God has much more for us, He has much more for us. He wants to get closer to us. He wants to manifest in a greater way with us.
As the prophecy said this morning. He wants to be completely revealed through us, He wants to be fully expressed through us, and the only way that can happen is by tearing down the layers of carnality which are in our soul, and this involves a shaking, and sometimes it is very painful, but it is much easier if you understand it when it is coming.
We shall be saved when we overcome that which we were born with. What were we born with? We inherited death when we came into this world. We inherited the death that our ancestor Adam fell into, and now Christ is being added to us, and the Father says, "Overcome." Overcome what? Your first birth, the birth of water that you originally came into this world with. "Overcome it with the birth of the spirit, which I have started in you as a mustard seed." It is a process, the resurrection of the dead is an overcoming process. It is a warfare, it is a battle. Every circumstance in your life can and must be defeated by the power of Christ.
Now, we cannot defeat our circumstances, our enemies, our problems with the power of Christ if we do not first agree to stop using our old ways of doing things. We must change, we must change. This resurrection will not be instantaneous, it is not a going to sleep, it is not a dying of the body and waking up in another place. Neither is it a dying of the soul while the body lives and waking up in full resurrection power. It is an overcoming, it is a battle.
Every circumstance, every hour, every minute of our life, we have a choice. Will we manifest, will we live out of, will we think with Christ, or will we do things that we have been doing for our entire life that our parents have done, that our grandparents have done, that our ancestors from a thousand years ago have done? Will we continue to do this or will we start living out of Christ?
We see many people all over the world, and God has shown me one thing. People are the same everywhere, the same problems exist. We may look different, our surface culture may be different, but the heart of man, wherever you go anywhere in the world, is the same. The Scripture tells us that, that condition is desperately wicked. The heart of man is desperately wicked. It must be converted.
In that desperate wickedness, it is dead. There is death in wickedness. The resurrection of the dead is the resurrection or the conversion of our wicked heart back up unto righteousness.
It is a warfare. There will be no magic wand going, "bup, you are righteous. Say, I repent, I repent. You are righteous." It is not true. You must get a new heart, and you cannot get a new heart by saying, "I want a new heart, I have a new heart." It is a spiritual experience which must happen to you. The Scripture likens it to childbearing. We have many women that are barren, they are married, they are lying with their husbands, they desire a child, but either they have a child, or they do not have a child. The fact that a woman is married does not mean she has a child, and the fact that the Holy Spirit is in your life does not mean that your heart has begun to be converted.
We have many people in the church today who speak in tongues, they prophesy, some of them do mighty signs and wonders of healing and deliverance, but in their human relationships with one another, they are corrupt, and many stumble over the discrepancy, over the difference between the man in the pulpit with the glorious anointing upon him, and the man that they meet on a one-to-one basis, who has just lied to them, who has just cheated them, who has not kept his word, who has disappointed them in one way or another.
This is the problem the Lord is dealing with today. I condemn nobody. I am just telling you what the condition of the church is all over the world.
We have imperfect men who have been granted the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the Scripture says that the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. We must know the truth about our condition if we are to ascend out of it, and I see Christians stumble almost every day because they see someone in the pulpit who is not perfect, and I am telling you today, there is no need for you to stumble. You should know that people in the pulpit are not perfect.
Why would it be that the members of the church think, frequently, that the members of the ministry are perfect? This is a manifestation of idolatry, idolatry for the man in the pulpit.
You have seen a lot of idolatry here in Nigeria. You know what idolatry is. It still exists, largely, but what the Lord wants you to understand, is that every sin that you see in your country, whether it be idolatry, witchcraft, or worship of ungodly spirits, everything that you see, and you know about that, has existed here, can and does exist on another level, and that is in your mind. It is hidden, it is unseen.
It is very easy for you to recognize a physical idolatry. You see someone bowing down to a statue, but spirits that are not of God are very subtle, brethren, and as you come into the Christian faith and you draw closer to God, you read that idolatry is forbidden, so you make your effort. You take your idols out of the house, you stop going to the herbalists, you stop doing these things, but, brethren, you must know that there is a spirit behind all of these activities. There are spirits, ungodly spirits, behind all of these unclean activities that you have physically rejected, but they are hiding. They have lied to you, and they are in your mind, and I do not believe anyone is exempt.
We must go before the Lord and ask Him to show us the hidden secrets of our mind, or the hidden secrets of our heart to us, and I leave this thought with you. The thinking that anyone in the pulpit is perfect, is idolatry. If you are doing this, you have made that person a living, walking, talking idol. As a matter of fact, you have made that person, in your mind, a manifestation of the beast, and the spirit, through your mind, has given breath to the image of the beast. Can you hear this? Praise God.
The battle ground is the mind. The resurrection of the dead, the cleansing of the heart, it is starting in your mind, because your heart is your mind.
I do not know how deeply you study, but I will tell you, in the New Testament if you look up in Strong's concordance the Greek word for heart and the Greek word for mind, they are two different words, but in the Hebrew they are just one word. The Greek just breaks it down, heart and mind. The heart is the spirit of man.
Now every time we want to understand something spiritual, we can look at our natural example. In the human body, the heart is the central organ. All is built around it, all the other organs are built around it, the heart keeps us alive, pumps the blood.
The heart of the spiritual man is his mind. Without a mind, we have no existence. Our mind, the heart of man, even though it is fallen, it is what separates us from the animals. It is no secret that we dwell in a body that the scientists know is an animal body. Is that not true? That is true, you know. Yet, there is obviously a difference between our body and the body of the animals. What is this difference? What makes us civilized, what gives us language, what gives us the ability to reason, what gives us the ability to improve our lives? It is the mind that is in us.
You see, the whole creation and everything in it was carved out of the substance of God. We are told that in John 1:1, everything that was made was made by him. Not by His hands, brethren, because God does not have hands. He is a spirit. If you study it in the Greek, what that Scripture is saying is that we are made out of Him. He gave up His existence as a glorified spirit in the bosom of the Father and permitted Himself to be made into a new form, so that we could come into existence.
We are made out of His substance, yet we find that some people in the church get into trouble with this teaching, and they say, ah, that is pantheism. You are saying everything is made of God. Well, my answer to that, brethren, is that the Lord is building a creation. He has made everything out of Himself, and then He has taken another measure of Himself and added it to man in the form of a mind.
We have a mind in our soul that makes us different than the animals. Soul, we are the living soul, and the mind which is in us determines whether this soul is alive or dead. When God first made the creation, the Scripture says that He took the man, and He put him upright in the Garden. What that means is that the Father took His creation, which was soul, and He gave it a righteous mind which would keep it alive, but that righteous mind did not abide in the creation. How do I know that? Because man does not have a righteous mind.
Right now, our mind is fallen. Something had to happen, there was a change, and now we must be changed back. We had a righteous mind, we now have a fallen mind, and we must get a righteous mind again. What the Lord is doing in this hour is He is coming to individuals, He is saying to examine yourself, stop idolizing the ministry, stop idolizing people, stop looking outside of you, stop looking at your brother's sin, but ask God to open your own eyes to the hidden sins of your heart, because everybody has them.
We are all fallen, with the exception of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the resurrection of the dead begins with an examination of self, an ability in Christ, an ability given to us by Christ to look at ourselves as if we were a different person, and we are a different person.
Are we not a new creature in Christ? Is there not a New Man growing inside of us? Is there not a New Man and an old man, is there not an inner man and an outer man? You are a new creature in Christ, and a separation must take place. When the mind of Christ first begins to grow in you, He is one with the mind you were born with.
You have heard about sanctification. Most people will tell you sanctification is withdrawal from ungodly religious practices, but I tell you that sanctification is separation of the mind of Christ from that which is corrupt, which is in our own heart. Separation from the world, brethren. The world is in your heart. We are told in the book of Ecclesiastes that God has put the worlds in our heart.
If you have Christ, you have two worlds in your heart or two ages in your heart. You have this fallen corruptible age, and you have the age of the Kingdom in your heart, and by recognizing and acknowledging your own sin and renouncing it, and refusing to yield to it, and refusing to do things the way you were taught, and your ancestors have been doing them for thousands of years but, by the power of God, living out of our new heart which is Christ, we will overcome the world.
Not the world out there, brethren, the world in here. Because the world out there is an expression, it is an image, it is a picture, it is an illusion of that which is in our heart and in our mind. The conversion of this world and everything corruptible in it, is starting with the conversion of our heart.
Let me say that again. That world out there, it is an image, like a moving picture, of the condition of men's hearts. Can you hear that? The corporate mind of man is projecting this corrupted image which we call our world and which, I declare to you, is hell. I say that the population of this planet cannot see the forest for the trees. Do not worry about going to hell, you are already there. Do not worry about getting the mark, you have already got it. You were born with it. I tell you the truth, and the truth will set you free. Hallelujah.
Contrary to everything we have ever experienced in our experience in this life, when the Lord comes to deliver us out of hell, He does not start out "there." He starts in "here." He starts in your heart, and every man is to go before God and say, "Father, where will you start with me? What sin am I engaged in that I am not aware of? What family line curse is operating that I am not aware of? What am I doing that I should not be doing? How am I feeling that I should not be feeling? What am I thinking that does not glorify you? How can I start to think with the mind of Christ?" It is an exercise to reject the mind that we were born with and think with Christ.
It takes a conscious effort which the Scripture describes as a warfare, and I use computer language, frequently, for an example. If you are not actively engaged in a warfare to think out of the mind of Christ, your mind defaults to the carnal mind. If you make no effort, you are carnal. If you are making no effort to overcome sin, you are in sin, I promise you. The Christian walk is a warfare. If you are not in the war, that means you are completely overcome. I do not care how good you look externally, I do not care if God has given you a beautiful house, and you have food to eat when others are starving, and your children are healthy when other people's children are sick and crippled. Yes, that is a blessing, and it is a good thing, but it will not give you eternal life.
Yes, you will reap what you sow. You do good deeds, you will receive good deeds, you feed the poor, God will feed you. This is all true, but you will not receive eternal life from good works. We are not saved by works, brethren, we are saved by grace. The question is, what is grace? One thing we have found out as we pursue the teachings that the Lord is letting me bring forth now, is that very frequently the definitions in the church are not correct.
What is grace? Anybody know what grace is? Unmerited favor. That is what I was taught too. It is unmerited favor. What does that mean to you as a human being? What is that unmerited favor doing for you, what has it done for you? Has it given you a new heart? You are still a sinner, amen? Okay. The unmerited favor of God is the heart of His son. It is nice that He is feeding you, and He is clothing you, and He is educating you, but the grace of God is Christ Jesus in you, the hope of glory.
Not just a gift of the spirit, and I love the gifts of the spirit, please do not misunderstand me, but there is more. The gifts of the spirit are imparted to us to accomplish a purpose, and that purpose is to bring forth the mind of Christ in you. It has to be planted in you.
The Scripture describes us as spiritual plant life. Are we not the planting of the Lord? We are spiritual plant life. Our spirit is a spiritual plant which is growing in the earth of our soul. Our soul is made out of the dust of the ground, and it has become earth. Our spirit puts down roots, deep down into our soul, and the problem that we have right now is that the roots that are going deep down into our soul are not the Father. They are not the Father, brethren.
I want to tell you that if you are existing, if you are a human being, if you are walking on the face of this earth, and you have a fallen heart, the spiritual roots that are rooted deep down are like the strongest weed, you know.
I do not know what kind of weeds you have here. In New York, they are dandelions. You cannot dig them up for anything, they go down deep into the ground. The root that has brought you here is Satan. I tell you the truth. He is not out there, he is not a red freak, he does not have horns and a tail.
He is in your heart, he is in your heart, and the grace of God is a new root, Hallelujah, a new root. His name is the Lord Jesus Christ, and He is perfect, and He is undefeatable, and He is able to convert your heart, but not without a warfare against the root that is already there. I want to tell you, that root is not bowing its knee to the Lord Jesus Christ.
It has to be hacked out. What is the name of your weeds here that you have to hack out? What is the name of a plant that you have here? You do not have it? We have weeds. You have to go with a hatchet, you have to dig up the dirt and hack that root, and dig it out. Then if you leave one little piece of that root in the ground, you come out one month later, and you have got a whole new plant again.
I want to tell you, that plant is not going to die. It has to be destroyed, and it is growing in your soul. The grace of God is the power of God to destroy it, and we must pick up this power and wage warfare against the heart that we were born with, and the Lord has given us rules. There are ways to do it, forgive your enemies, pray for those who hate you, bless those that despitefully use you.
When you do such things, you are building the heart of God in you. If you use it, it will increase in you. If you do not use the grace of God that has been imparted to you, you are like unto the unfaithful servant that has buried his talent under the ground, and, indeed, you have taken that gift of God, the Holy Spirit, and buried it under the earth of your soul, and there has been no increase.
What does the Scripture say? That you shall lose what you received if there is no increase. The word of the Lord to His people today is that the message that has been imparted to the church has not been complete, that you are very likely to have heard some wrong teaching that has told you, "Well, you have the gifts of the spirit, rest, you are safe," and I am here today to tell you, that is not true. You have received the gift of the Holy Spirit. Pick up the weapons of your warfare because the battle is raging, and the one who does not fight will be left behind.
There is so much teaching in the church today, so many divers doctrines. It is enough to confuse you, but if you have the grace of God, there is no confusion in Christ Jesus.
If your heart is truly turned towards God, and you ask Him to keep you from error, and if you ask Him for the truth no matter what the price is, He will see that you recognize His anointing on His people. The problem is that it is not that one preacher is good and one preacher is bad. That would be easy. If someone walked around with a sign that said "Angel of light," then you could run away. That is easy, right? It is not that way.
We see anointed people of God coming to preach to you, they look good, they sound good, frequently they have a powerful anointing on them, sometimes they have signs and wonders following them, and as soon as you relax, they slip in a lie that is going to kill you.
The hour of the reconciliation of all things is at hand, and the Lord wants all of his people to enter in, but you must take an active part in this. There is a doctrine circulating in the church that says, "Sit back and take your shoes off, and relax, and you will enter in automatically," and I tell you today this is a lie being perpetrated by very well-meaning preachers. They believe it, but I challenge you to pray about this, because if you are sitting down with your shoes off waiting to enter in automatically, my Bible says that the door is about to close, and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Now the whole counsel of God must work together. You cannot throw Scriptures out. If you have a Scripture that does not fit into your doctrine, you owe it to yourself to get before God and say, "Father, either my doctrine is wrong, or explain it to me, I do not understand," and He is faithful. He will do it to you, but you must understand that understanding the true message of God is an ongoing effort. There is false doctrine everywhere, all around you, false spirits, and false doctrine. Are you tossed about by every wind of doctrine?
Most believers cannot discern the spirit of God. It is easy to discern a wrong spirit. You get a terrible feeling right in your heart, you know it is not God, but what about doctrine, brethren? The Scripture says, if you are deceived, you are deceived by the pride of your own heart. What does that mean? It means that a messenger comes with the truth, and the truth is not pleasant, and your own heart, that root that you were born with who was really Satan in your own mind, says, "Now hear this, this is God speaking, that is a false prophet, just sit back and relax and you will ascend automatically."
Which is the true prophet? Brethren, the false prophet is in your mind. If I am a false prophet, I cannot hurt you if the true prophet is ruling in your mind. My words cannot hurt you. Nothing external can hurt you if Jesus is truly ruling and reigning in your mind. The reason we get hurt today, we get sick, the reason we make mistakes is because Jesus is not fully reigning in our mind. As much as we would like to believe it, He is not, because if He was fully reigning in our mind, we would not have any problems, and we would be raised from the dead. That is the resurrection of the dead.
The fullness of the mind that was in the man, Jesus, The Christ, ruling and reigning in your mind, that is the resurrection of the dead. We do not have it yet. We have it in part.
How come we only have it in part? I read the Bible, and it said, "Let that mind that was in Christ Jesus be in you." Well, what do you mean I do not have it yet? Brethren, it is a promise that started with the implantation of a seed in your heart. It has to grow up, it has to fully develop, and it develops through a series of experiences, trials and errors. It involves knowledge, it involves wisdom, and it involves counsel. God does not want you to be a robot.
He does not want you following a religious law that says, "Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, do not do it and I will bless you, do not do it and I will bless you." That was good for a season, but the Father has better things for us, brethren. He has spiritual manhood for us, the internalization of the law of Christ in your heart, so that I do not have to come to you and tell you, "Thou shalt not, thou shalt not." You will not, you will not do what is sin. Why? Because it will be contrary to your nature.
Why do we sin? Because it is our nature to sin. We cannot help but sin. That is why I repent daily. Every thought that is not of faith is sin. As harmless as it seems to you, it is sin. If you were not sinning, your body would not be corruptible. The sign that you have no sin is that your body is not subject to the pestilence of this world system.
There is no mosquito that can bite you that can give you malaria, there is no microbe in the water that could give you...what is it? Typhoid fever you get from the water? There is nothing that could harm you if you did not have sin in your mind. Why? Because this body is an expression of your mind. Your mind is dead so your body can die, and when you get a mind that is truly alive, it will preserve your body.
Paul had a snake bite him, and he shook the snake off, and they thought he was a god. Well, when Christ Jesus is ruling in your mind from a position of full spiritual manhood, you are a God. Did the Father not say to the Hebrews who did not have such an anointing, "You are gods, but you shall die like men?" What did that mean?
We have a Bible filled with mysteries. What does that mean, "Are you not gods, but you shall die like men?" I will tell you what it means. It means that Israel had a spirit that had the potential to become the mind of God in that nation, but it never happened and, therefore, they died like men.
If you are a woman, and you have two ovaries filled with ovum, millions of ovum, and you never conceive, you are a human being that had a potential to produce life, but it never happened.
If you are a man, you have the potential to begat life. It either will happen, or it will not happen. Just like Israel in this hour, everybody here has the potential to produce the fullness of the stature of the Lord Jesus Christ in their minds, but it has not happened to you yet. I know it because you just cut your finger the other night, and you had to put disinfectant on it. We are told in the Prophets where we see Israel rebuked in the Prophets, and they are told by the Father, "You have brought forth nothing but wind."
Are you familiar with that Scripture? "You brought forth wind." Do you know what that means? They had the potential to bring forth Christ, and instead they brought forth another spirit which is just ruined, the Bible calls it nothing.
Do you know the Lord calls the spirit of Satan nothing? He does not even give it a name. To God, he is nothing, and He said to Israel, "You have a potential for greatness, and you brought forth corruption." He said, "You are menstrual rags, you have the potential to bring forth the manchild, and you aborted."
He says the same thing to the church today. The church today is in the same, or I should not say same, but in a similar condition to that which natural Israel was in, with one major exception and that is this. Israel had the potential to bring forth the Christ, but in the condition they were in, it was really impossible.
In this hour, because the Lord Jesus Christ overcame His carnal mind and gave up as a sacrifice His perfected life as the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and because He has returned to the Father, pure spirit, and is now pouring out of heaven upon all flesh. When He lands on your heart, you now have the grace of God which is the potential to bring forth that man-child that you should not produce wind, that the Lord should not say to you that you are a menstrual rag, but that you have the potential to begat the son of God, the man-child of Revelation 12, the reproduction of the nature of Christ in you.
Christ in YOU, the hope of glory. Not in ME. He has to get into you, He has to grow in you, He has to put down roots in you, He has to appear in you, and He has to overcome your carnal mind.
In this hour, we find a church in the same condition as natural Israel with one asset that natural Israel did not have, Christ in you the hope of glory, and will God say unto you, "I have given you everything you need, and you have brought forth wind?" Let Him not say that to you.
I will close with just a reminder of the crux of this message because you probably never heard this before. The hour of the reconciliation of all things is at hand, the dead are about to be raised. That which is the dead is not your body, it is not your grandmother that died last year, and it is not all the souls that you think are floating around in heaven. You are the dead, and you are spirit living inside of a soul and a body which is a prison house. It is the hour for the resurrection of your dead, human spirit, and the way this will be accomplished is not by laying on of hands by someone like me, although I might do that if you need help, but the resurrection of the dead will be accomplished by the seed of Christ, which is the grace of God being imparted to you which most of you have already. It has to implant in you.
James speaks about the "implanted word." It has to put down root in you, it has to grow in you, it has to reproduce the nature of Christ in you, and when that mind of Christ, when that grace of God starts to function in you, when that baby starts to kick, when you see and feel signs of life in your spiritual womb which is your mind, you have to pick up that Christ as a weapon and slay your enemy the Dragon in the sea of your soul.
You will have to confess that you have sinned, you will have to confess everything that the Lord comes to you and shows you, and I tell you it will not be pretty. I know because I have been through it, and I am still going through it, but when the Father comes and says, "You are guilty," brethren, bow your head down and say, "Lord I am guilty, forgive my sins."
Then you will stand up in Christ and wage war against that thing, and you will kill that beast, a sin at a time, a sin at a time. It cannot be done all at once. We would die. As the beast is destroyed, Christ is increasing in us, and, simultaneously, will be the death of the carnal mind and the exaltation of Christ in us to full stature. I warn you, it is a warfare with your own mind, and Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, will raise up every human being he can to come at you with suggestions that are not of God.
Who is Satan? He is the unconscious part of the carnal mind of fallen man. He is in your mother, he is in your brother, he is in your best friend. They will come to you not even knowing what they are doing, and, in so many words, they will say, "Curse God and die." Was that not Job's wife? "Curse God and die." Remember the prophet that went to warn Jeroboam? God said to him, "Deliver your message and come back, do not stop to talk to anybody, go back a different way than you came." A man of God came to him and stopped him in the way and said, "Come and eat with me," and the prophet said, "Oh no, the Lord told me to go straight home," and the prophet said, "But I hear from God too."
In this hour, brethren, those of your own household will be your enemies. Now I do not come to impart paranoia to you. God wants to teach you how to deal with this in the love of Christ, that we will grab hold of Him, that we will be determined to live out of Him and every thought that is not of God whether it comes from our own heart, from our husband, from our wife, from our respected minister, anybody, you obey the Lord wherever he speaks.
We must develop an ability to hear His voice, and people are not walking around with signs that say, "Angel of light." It is everybody in your life coming to put doubt in your mind. "Did God really say that? Did God really tell you to go back a different way and not have...now, why would God tell you to not eat with me? What is wrong with having dinner with me? Do you not like me? Have I offended you, what have I done to hurt your feelings?"
The prophet said, "Oh, God talks to me too." Do you hear what I am telling you? This is the hour of your conversion, and your conversion will be accomplished through obedience to Christ, and you cannot obey Christ if you cannot recognize Him. If you cannot recognize Him, ask God to help you to recognize Him. Please do not be condemned and do not be frightened. God has sent me with this message because He wants you to stand up in the fullness of the stature of the Lord Jesus Christ, and He has promised you that the truth will set you free.
He will teach you, He has a personal plan for everybody. He will teach you a step at a time, and He will give you experiences. If you fail, He will forgive you. He will teach you from your mistake, and He will give you new experiences. If you can, just keep yourself humble before Him. That which will destroy you, the enemy which will destroy your life in Christ, is pride.
Your failure or inability to confess your sins and repent will destroy your spiritual life. David was an adulterer and a murderer, and he was beloved of God no matter what he did. He said, "Father you are righteous and I am unrighteous, I did it." The greatest enemy of the spiritual man is pride, and it is all through the church, all over the world.
When God really starts exposing your sins, they do not want to do it, they do not want to do it. They want to be righteous. Well, there is nothing wrong with desiring righteousness, but let it be the reality. Let it not be a self-righteousness, because self-righteousness will destroy you. If you say you are righteous, there is no way to impart the righteousness of God to you.
The judgment of the church has begun, but another way of saying that the judgment of the church has begun is that this is the White Throne Judgment. This is what it is. It is Christ, either in your own heart, or it is somebody else coming to you in the spirit of God, exposing your sin. Now, we must beware of religious spirits and people who would condemn us. Condemnation is never of God, but God will speak to you first and say, "This is the sin that I want you to deal with." Most of the time, a lot of the time, we cannot hear, so He will send somebody else.
You must pray about everything somebody says to you. An automatic defense of oneself without asking God if this is true is the sin of pride, because the sins of our heart are hidden. They are hidden, we are blinded to them.
Why? Because for all of these thousands of years that man has been fallen, if we were to look upon our sins before the provision was made to purge ourselves, we would have broken hearts, knowing truly how fallen we are. In this hour that the power is available to you to cleanse you of that sin upon your confession and repentance, now God says, "Repent, oh man, and I will give you a new heart."
We find that people have trouble doing this because, for generations, man has been defending himself against other people who would try to bring him down, and this has been a Godly thing. Would you have someone come in and overtake you, and your home, and your family? You must ask God for the ability to recognize His spirit and to understand that He is dealing with you if a sin is being exposed. Submit yourself. This is the Judgment Seat of Christ, and the books that are being opened are the carnal minds of men. Every carnal mind must die.
Now hear me. As Christ is growing in you, when your carnal mind dies, Christ will arise and sustain the flesh of this body. This is the resurrection of the dead. It is a simultaneous procedure which starts with the exposure of sin and the destruction of it, and God has brought this to you, Hallelujah. The judgment of the church is upon us, and after the judgment, the resurrection. God bless you.
COMMENT: I believe the Lord has kind of opened up a lot of things this morning, and I would like to say that you have said so much, you touched on so many areas. I want to touch on one particular area and that is, if you look at the disciples of Jesus Christ, Jesus says, "Have I not called twelve of you and one of you is a devil?" Does it mean that the others did not have the spirit? We all know that they had the carnal mind, and they had this death inherent in them. How do we explain this situation of one being the devil, and he went off fulfilling the calling for which he was called for? How do we explain that?
PASTOR VITALE: Well, this is a very hard word because there are those in the church who are teaching in this hour that every single human being will be saved. You have heard that teaching? Have you heard that teaching? As I mentioned earlier, we cannot throw Scriptures away. That is a very good question.
I am just thinking of how to say this simply. The Father has ordained that everyone that is ordained to reveal Christ in full stature must be tried, and they must be tried severely, and there must be a Serpent to try them. Who are we to say that it is not the Father's right to raise up a vessel of honor and a vessel of dishonor, and has He not made vessels of gold and silver as well as vessels of hay and stubble?
What does this mean? It means the Lord permits human beings to appear in our life whose purpose is to try the sons. This is a hard word. Heresies must exist between us. Why? That those who are of the faith will be revealed. God has created evil. He made the evil for the...He made the pestilence for the day of evil. What is the day of evil?
The day of evil is the judgment of your soul. It is the day that God does evil to your carnal mind, and the result of that evil is your resurrection from the dead. I am going to give you something. This is a very deep teaching. I am going to try to present it to you as simply as I can, and we will see if God quickens it to you or not. This is a hard word.
We are not this body. We are spirit, and we are living in a soul, okay. At the beginning of time, God formed one living soul, that is a spiritual creation. At the beginning of time, there were no bodies like this. The Scripture likens him to a plant that has a deep root in the ground, and as a young plant has three or four leaves. As a mature plant can have fifty leaves, you can cut down forty-nine of the leaves, and the plant still lives.
The spiritual reality of the creation, and the spiritual reality of you and me is that when this body dies, and the soul that sins, it will die, so if our human spirit is not raised from the dead our body will die, and our soul will die. The spirit returns unto the Father, and it is the spirit that is being raised from the dead. This personality is just a temporal thing, it is just a garment that we are wearing.
The man who was raised up to be the Devil, it is not a question of him burning in hell forever because he was used as a vessel of dishonor. His existence is a temporary existence. Let me put it one more way to you.
When his job is finished...after Judas condemned Jesus, we know that he died. The Father raised him up to be this vessel of dishonor. The body died, his soul sinned, his soul died, and the spirit which was the only part of him which was truly a part of this spiritual plant went back to the Father.
Are we not told in Jeremiah that if the potter is not pleased with the vessel, He will mar it and reform it? We find that there is one spirit in many members so the measure of that spirit which was in this vessel, which was raised up to do dirty work, that is one way to put it, that spirit returns and God will...the whole spirit of mankind is being raised from the dead.
Everybody that you see, and every soul that you have known, is being reformed. It is going back to the clay. We are imperfect, we are imperfect. If we die, that means that God has marred us because of our imperfection, and it is the spirit which is of God. The spirit that gives us life, the spirit that raises us up above the animals, the spirit that is our true essence, that is what we are, it is the spirit that is being raised from the dead.
In that last day, that it is the hour for the resurrection of the dead on this planet earth, the souls and the bodies that the spirit which comes from God is living in, those souls and those bodies will be made permanent.
Until that time, until that last day when it is time for the resurrection of the dead spirit, the bodies and souls that the spirit is appearing in will continue to die and go back into the clay to be reformed by the potter. Do you understand what I am saying? Okay.
A lot of people hear me say this, and they think I am preaching reincarnation. I am not preaching reincarnation. There is a big difference between what I am saying and reincarnation, and I will just give you a couple of basic principles, and I will take more questions if you have them. Do not be afraid to ask me, this is a big issue.
Reincarnation preaches the rebirth of the soul. I have told you that the soul that sins dies. Reincarnation preaches the evolution of the soul. I have told you the soul that sins dies.
Reincarnation, to the best of my knowledge, does not even recognize that there is a spirit in man. My Bible says in the Book of Job that there is a spirit in man. Reincarnation teaches karma, which says what you do in this life will cause your soul to reincarnate, and you will reap the good or the evil that you did in this life in another soulish form. I say unto you, salvation is through the union of your spirit with the Son of God, and that he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.
I say unto you that there is no good work that you could do that would save your soul. There is no such thing as salvation by works. This living soul, the creation of God, will continue to appear on the earth in this fallen place which I declare to you is hell. We will continue to propagate ourselves, we will continue to have babies and reproduce the human race until the spirit of God is fully born in us, and that is His work.
There is nothing that we can do to raise our self out of this place. There is no work that we can do, there is no way we can make our self righteous, and we wait, as Job said, for our change to come.
Salvation is through union with Christ. It is the spirit of God that was in the living soul when it was first formed which died, which continues to appear in this world system with new bodies and new souls. The Scripture likens it to garments. When your dress wears out, you put on a new garment. The spiritual creation called the living soul that died will continue to appear in this world system with new garments, new souls and new bodies, until it is raised from the dead through union with the Christ.
In that last day, when Christ stands on this earth in full stature, the souls and the bodies which are just formed out of the clay that He is appearing in, that generation will be baked in the oven and made permanent.
The key is that we are not these bodies, neither are we these souls. What is your soul? Your soul is your personality. The key is that we are spirit, and we have a problem perceiving ourselves as spirit in this hour, because our spirit is dead and, for all intents and purposes, we are living as a soul, and we are soulish people.
If we have a relationship with Christ, and we are starting to move in spiritual things, even then our life is very soulish. We are spiritual when we come to church, we prophesy, but we are not spiritual people. We are really not. That is just the truth, because we have the gift of the spirit, but we are not raised from the dead yet.
People that hear this teaching frequently have trouble identifying with their spiritual self. They think, "Who is my spiritual self?" If my soulish self will die, there will be nothing left of me, and some people become very afraid, but I remind you of something that I said earlier. The resurrection of the dead spirit in you, when your spirit is raised from the dead he becomes Christ. The resurrection of Christ in you, the impartation of Christ in you to the fullness of the stature of the Lord Jesus Christ is a simultaneous action with the destruction of your sin-filled heart.
The Lord will not permit any part of your heart to be destroyed before that part, that corresponding part of Christ in you, is ready to stand up and perform His function.
Brethren, if we did not have a mind, we would be like the animals. If the Lord wiped out your carnal mind, you would be an animal. He is not wiping out your mind without giving you a new mind, and a better mind, and a glorified mind, and a mind that will impart life to your soul and your body.
"If that spirit which raised Christ from the dead dwell in you, it will quicken your mortal body." Your soul is not being raised from the dead. Your spirit is being raised from the dead, and you cannot identify with spirit right now because you are dead. I tell you the truth. Anybody else have a question?
COMMENT: As a continuation, you know that Scripture which says ...which I just quoted about Jesus Christ, goes on to say that there was a question being asked Jesus, "Who is he amongst us who will betray you? He said, when I dip my hand in the plate, the one who dips also will betray me." The Bible says that immediately after that, the Devil entered into him. How do you explain that?
PASTOR VITALE: That is a very good question, and it is an excellent example of what I have been trying to impart to you today. If the Holy Spirit has done his work in you, and He has engrafted to your heart, there is a spiritual life growing in you. The Scripture likens it to childbearing.
Are you familiar with that Scripture, "In that last day we shall see a man with his hands on his loins as if he were pregnant." There is a spiritual birth and pregnancy that knows no sex. There is no male or female in Christ, it is spiritual. When the Holy Spirit engrafts to your soul, it is likened to a woman conceiving a child.
Now ladies, you know that from the moment you conceive you do not feel life sometimes for up to five months, but there is a life growing in you. If there is a life growing in you, when it starts to kick, when you feel that life, when that life becomes active, when it starts manifesting, you now have two lives, two minds.
James said, "The double-souled or the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." What does that mean? One minute you are thinking with the mind of Christ, and the next minute you are thinking with the mind you were born with, and you have two minds. When the Scripture says, "And Satan entered into him...," Well, let me back up a little. I told you that the mind that you are born with is Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind.
When the Scripture says that Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, entered into him, it means that there was a warfare between the two minds in that instant, and Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, in Judas' mind put Christ underfoot, tread him underfoot, and his mind became completely Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, and he did the evil deed. Did I answer your question?
Anyone not understand this point or anything that I have talked about so far? Praise God.
COMMENT: Praise the name of the Lord. I want to ask something that is related to what my brother just asked, but it still has to do with this issue of the personality, you know, because that is why it has been very difficult for most of us to understand this teaching about the resurrection. In II Timothy, Chapter 4, when Paul was giving an account of his ministry, I want to read from ...this is the New World translation. I think it is about the same thing as the King James.
It says in Verse 6, "For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the due time for my releasing is imminent. I have fought the fine fight, I have run the course to the finish, I have observed the faith. From this time on, there is reserved for me the crownlets of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me as a reward in that day. Yet not only to me, but also to all those who have loved his manifestation."
Now the impression that one has from this Scripture is that Paul is talking of him receiving a crownlets or a reward, which means the identity of his personality is still there. We know that Paul died, but he talks about standing up in the day of Christ to receive his reward. How do you explain that if you say the personality is not resurrected?
PASTOR VITALE: Well, I believe what he was talking about was that he had a revelation that his spirit would be raised from the dead. Even in the Book of Daniel, the angel says to Daniel, "In that last day, ye shall stand on the earth again." Paul had a revelation that his identity was not soul, but his identity was spirit.
As a second witness, I remind you of Jesus' words, "If you can receive it, John the Baptist is Elijah," had a different name, a different man, different personality, a different family, but Jesus said, "John the Baptist is Elijah." Well, what in the world was he talking about? He was saying that the spirit in that man was the same spirit that was in Elijah.
Well, how could we recognize this? You look at what the man did. Elijah was a prophet, John was a prophet, Elijah rebuked kings, John rebuked kings, Elijah was a holy man, John was a holy man.
Your identity, your spiritual identity, is not in emotion, it is not in appearance, it is not by the works of your hands. It is by the works that you do by God's spirit. If you have no works growing out of His spirit at this moment, you have no spiritual identity. Do not get upset, just tell God you want it. All that means is that your spiritual life is not flickering yet. The resurrection of the dead is a process.
That Scripture that says, "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," I am convinced that this is a spiritual moment, that it is not a twinkling of your corrupt eye, but it is a twinkling of God's eye, and that what it is talking about is one lifetime. Brethren, when God opens His eyes and looks at you, you appear, and when He closes His eyes, you are gone. You will be raised from the dead in one lifetime. If you have a spiritual life, if you prophesy, if you pray in tongues, if you pray in English, in the spirit, your spiritual life is flickering, but that is just the beginning. It has to grow up into the fullness of the stature of Christ. Did I answer your question? Okay.
Paul had a revelation that he was not the personality, that Paul was just a garment. Anybody else? I have so much I could tell you, but I do not want to overdo it. You can only bear so much, but I will go with the spirit. I have much to tell you.
COMMENT: I Thessalonians, Chapter 4:13, Paul says, "I would not wish you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those having fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve as those others who have not the hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose, so also we believe that God, through Jesus, will bring forth with Him those who fell asleep. For this we reaffirm to you by the Lord's word that, we, the living who are left over to the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who fell asleep, because the Lord Himself will come down from heaven with a shout, and with the archangel's voice and with God's trumpet, and the dead in Christ will be raised first. Then we, the living who are left over, shall, at the same time with them, be caught away in the clouds, meeting the Lord in the air."
COMMENT: If you say that there is no personality when people are raised up from the dead or something like that? What would you say about those who have fallen asleep, you know? I believe it is talking about those who fell asleep, died physically, and they will still be raised.
PASTOR VITALE: We just recently studied this Scripture. I do have it on a tape which I will leave with sister xxxxxxx. I have it for her now, I just have not dug it out of my suitcase yet. Most of the teaching that you will hear coming from me is a result of studying the Scripture in the original Greek. The Lord will give me a revelation in my heart, but I do not just preach on revelation. He always shows it to me in the Scripture.
Now, just like the English dictionary, every Greek word has many translations, and if you take a sentence with five Greek words, and you choose a different legitimate definition or translation for each word, you come up with a whole new sentence. What God has been doing with me is, He will put a revelation in my heart, and I go digging into the Greek, look up all the words, and if I can get a second witness through alternate legitimate Greek translations, that is my witness. Do you understand what I am saying? Okay.
We did that with this Scripture just a couple of months ago and, much to my surprise, we found out that the traditional church understanding is not what it is saying at all, and I do have it on a tape, I will leave it with you. What it is saying, when we study the Greek, is that the one who is....maybe I have to look at the Scripture.
Let me get the Scripture. "But I would not have you be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep." Now let me comment on the word "asleep." We looked that word up in the Greek, and it does not mean dead.
Jesus, as you probably know, uses the word "asleep" to indicate someone who has died with a potential to be raised from the dead. That is the word that He used concerning Lazarus. "He is just sleeping." There are at least three Greek words that translate "death." This is, I believe, a fourth word, and its specific implication is that someone has died and is waiting to be raised from the dead. We are assuming it is our loved ones.
I am suggesting to you the one who died, that was waiting to be raised from the dead, was the original creation.
Do you remember the beginning of my message? We died, in Adam all died. Adam is the one who died, the creation died, and the reason the creation died was that the mind in the creation died. The creation had a mind which was righteous, and it died, and it became unrighteous. It became death. Our mind is death, to be carnally minded is death.
The one who is asleep, who is waiting to be raised from the dead, is the mind of Christ which fell at the beginning of time, and as we went through all the Greek words in this section, what we found Paul to be saying is, "If you do not believe in the resurrection of the dead, if you cannot believe this message that the mind that God put in the creation that brought it higher up than the animals, if you cannot believe that, that mind died, and that the Father is going to put it in you again, if you do not believe that God is going to rip out your carnal mind which is the beast, and replace it with the life of Christ Jesus, then in this world, those of us who have been waiting for deliverance from the crying and the tears of this world, most miserable are we." Can you hear this? Did I answer your question.
It is okay if you want me to speak more I will. I want you to understand. Praise God. Most miserable are we, brethren, if all we have are the gifts of the spirit. I love the gifts of the spirit, but you are all going to die as you prophesy. I tell you the truth, you are going to depart from this world with prophecy on your lips if your spirit is not raised from the dead. Prophecy is wonderful, but if God permit, let us go on to perfection.
Do not stop here, do not camp on this side of the Jordan, because there are great spiritual gifts on the other side. The giants are very big, but we could do all things in Christ, amen? Anybody else?
COMMENT: I was waiting for people to ask questions, but I have this Scripture I want to read which I think will extract some more of the things the Lord has kept inside of you. If I read the book of Revelation, Chapter 4, we are studying this right now, and it sort of raised up some questions I want to talk to you about. I believe that the things that the Lord is going to do in us by His spirit are related to things that are said in this Scripture. I just want you to expand on them.
It says in Verse 4, "And round about the throne were four and twenty seats, upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting clothed in white raiment, and on their head crowns of gold. And out of the throne proceeded lightenings and thunderings and voices, and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven spirits of God. And before the throne, there was a sea of glass like unto crystal, and in the midst of the throne round about the throne were four beasts full of eyes before and behind."
It goes on to say in Verse 7, "And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face of a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him, and were full of eyes within, and they rest not day and night saying, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, which is, and is to come." I do not want to go on and on. I know you know about this.
Now what I am saying, I believe that this particular Scripture has to do with the beast powers that are in us. I mean, they are all symbolic representations of things in the spirit realm. How do we relate to this? I mean, how does this relate to us because I believe that, first, the spirit of the Lord is going to move in such a way that there are going to be eyes within, in fact what you are saying is that there is going to be an eye within to be able to consciously understand the things of the spirit, eyes before, eyes behind, and then it says eyes within, a kind of consciousness.
Now how are these things going to be worked in, how is He going to bring these things into fruition in our lives so that we can be consciously aware of the work of the spirit that the Lord is doing inside us? Such that we will not look at it as if it is a condemnation kind of warfare like you said, you know, condemning, and condemning and condemning, but looking at the positive aspects of the things that the Lord is bringing? I mean how do you relate all these things to the work He is doing in us?
PASTOR VITALE: Again, this is an excellent question and it ties into everything I was speaking about today, so through this brother's questions the Lord has given you examples which will witness to what I have been saying.
The eyes of your understanding are Christ in you, your new life is Christ in you. You must bear the man-child, you must bear the man-child. He is your understanding, He is your wisdom, He is your knowledge, He is your safety, He is your righteousness, He is your defense. All entrance into the spirit is through the door, but the door is inside of you. He must grow in you, He must increase in you.
When He increases to the fullness of the stature of the Lord Jesus Christ, He will be a manifestation of the seven spirits of God in you. He is going to arise in us and swallow up this personality that we now have. This is what we wait for.
I wait for it, I pray for it, I bring you the message, and some days I am so carnal. It is His work, He must swallow up the death in us. Did I answer your question? It is Him, it is Him. Now there is a teaching in the church today, it sounds so much like what I am saying, but it is the exact opposite.
There is a teaching in the church that is saying, "You have a potential, there is a Logos in you, you as you are now, you as you were born, have the potential to become Christ."
Pray about it if you hear it, because I declare unto you it is a lie, and if you receive it and live on it, it is going to destroy your spiritual life. You will enter into perfection, you will be raised from the dead, you will receive all knowledge and all wisdom and all eyes that will be our defenses when Christ is born in you. You shall be saved in childbearing. There is no male or female in Christ Jesus.
Spiritually, we are all women, and I am sorry men. It is tough on the men, but in relationship to God, we are all women. We must conceive, and we must bear the child of God, and when the child of God is in us, we shall be saved by childbearing.
There is a potential in you, there is a female seed in you, and I declare unto you that if you do not....if your child is not begotten of the Father, any child you bring forth will be a spiritually female child, and there is no salvation in female children. You must bear the man-child if you are a human being alive in this hour. Brethren, we cannot appear without having a spiritual child. The fact that we exist means that we have borne a spiritual child. If we are dead, if we are existing in a dead form, we know that we have borne a female child.
The man, Jesus of Nazareth, bore a male child, and the Father raised Him from the dead.
When you hear that teaching, I employ you to pray about it. It is going to destroy many. I am going to say it again. Every human being alive is a spiritual egg. Let not the Lord declare that you have been a menstrual rag. You must bring forth the man-child. You, of yourself, can only bring forth a female child which will result in your living out a lifetime on this earth which may be or may not be pleasant, and then you will die.
Eternal life is in the Son, and it is in none other. The potential for it is within you, but your child must be begotten of God, because if you have a child that is not begotten of God, your child is begotten of Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, I tell you the truth. The daughter of Babylon, she is in all of us. Why do you think the Father says, "If I do not chasten you, you are a bastard." Does that not say to you that the whole human race is a bastard, except for those who are moving in Christ?
Well what does that mean? It means that your appearing in this existence has been begotten of God's wife. Did you know that this original creation was made to be God's wife, did you know that? She was unfaithful to Him, and she bore Satan's child, us. That makes us bastards. Her true husband, the living soul's true husband, the Father God, is adopting us, because He loves His wife, and He has forgiven her sins, and He is adopting her children.
Now, I remind you of the Hebrew children that went into Babylon when God raised up Ezra and Nehemiah to lead them out. The law was read, and it was declared that every Hebrew man that had married a Babylonian woman must leave the woman and must leave the children, if they wanted to follow God.
In this hour, this human race is, including us that have the spirit, we are still dead. We just have the seed of the Father that may or may not have cleaved unto your female seed at this point. The Father's wife was unfaithful, and He is calling His wife back, and according to the Levitical law, He would have to kill or leave all of us for dead, but because we are the bastard children of his wife, Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, is our father, but because God is rich in mercy and because He loves us, He shall adopt us as sons.
I want to tell you that the adoption is not like a human adoption. It is not just the signing of a piece of paper.
Brethren, you must know, I know that you are much more aware of this in Nigeria than we are in the United States, that you inherit the characteristics of your family. You know that, do you not? It goes from generation to generation. Brethren, we have the nature of our father stamped on our heart. We are the beast, we are the incarnation of Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind. In the natural, if a man adopts a child, if a man falls in love with a woman and she has an illegitimate child....we are illegitimate, brethren, and he marries the woman and he takes her child, he takes the responsibility for her child, he feeds her child, he works for her child, but he has no authority to wipe out the curses that are on that child's nature because of the illegitimacy.
When the Lord Jesus Christ adopts you, you cannot be a shame unto His name. You cannot walk around with beast nature and say your Father is God. We have a whole church world today walking around saying, "My father is God and I will praise Him," and they are going out, and they are killing their brother. I do not condemn them, I just want to expose it to you.
The Lord Jesus Christ has the authority to adopt you and to change your nature. He is going to take your body, and He is going to take your soul, and He is going to write a new name on you, so that you will be a praise unto His name and not a disgrace unto Him.
If you have received the promise of the Holy Spirit, it is just that, and you must know it, because if you believe that you have inherited everything that there is to inherit, this belief will hinder you from going on with God, because there is work for you to do.
The impartation of His life is a free gift. After that, you must study to show yourself approved, you must fight the war, there is work to do. If you think there is nothing to do, you will die in the wilderness. Your beast nature must be erased so that you can receive the nature of God, and then you will be adopted as sons.
Until this happens, if you have received the holy promise, the Scripture expresses your condition by saying, you have an imputed righteousness, righteousness has been imputed unto you. It has been promised unto you, it has been attributed unto you. The Father looks at you and He says, "Behold, my Son, he is in the Scripture everyday, he is doing everything he can to be righteous despite his fallen soul. He confesses his sins, and he repents, and the Father says, "I will keep the hand of destruction from destroying you, and I will do a work in you that will convert your nature from death unto life."
It is a promise but, brethren, you are not adopted, and you are not a son of God until it happens to you.
You cannot enter into the Kingdom with mind control. The whole church out there, I love all these brothers that are preaching this, but God has given me a different message. Well actually, it is the same message. We differ in how it is going to happen. You cannot accomplish this by believing it, this is not a work of your intellect.
There is nothing you can do. It is a gift that must be given to you. Man wants to control his destiny. If you want to live, you must give up control of your destiny. You are not a son of God, we are not a son of God, we will die like men unless God is fully born in us. It has to happen to you. Just like you prophesy, just like you pray in the spirit.
You know, I do not know about you, but I have had people come...I had someone come to me once, and they said, "Oh, I had such a wonderful day, I went to see my doctor and he received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and something, the Lord quickened something inside of me," and I said, "Well, what happened? Was there any manifestation, was there a flicker of light, did he speak in tongues, was there any sign of life at all?" She says, "No I prayed for him, and he said, I receive it."
Brethren, do not tell me that man was baptized in the Holy Spirit. Do you hear what I am saying? It must happen to you, and if you are deceiving yourself, you are the only one who is deceived. I knew a woman once, she wanted a child so badly that she talked herself into it and every month, she got bigger and every month got bigger and after twelve months, they put her in the hospital. Something was wrong, she was this big, and there was no baby. She was not pregnant. It must happen to you.
The Scripture says that there is a spiritual weed, and we know in this world, weeds grow everywhere. You do not have to cultivate much of the green that is on the ground. It is a weed, it springs up of itself. The life that we have now, it has sprung up of itself. The life we have now, it is a spiritual weed. Your carnal mind is a spiritual weed.
If you want to inherit eternal life, you must humble yourself before God, give up the works of your flesh, give up your grudges, give up your so-called rights, and give yourself to God in humility, and ask Him to have mercy on you, and, Lord willing, you will be amongst the company that is about to be raised from the dead.
We have a whole group of preachers going around saying, "You got it, you got it, as soon as you believe it, you are going to see the signs." Well, I want to tell you that man got prayed for the Holy Spirit, and he believed he had it, but I did not see any signs. Does anybody not know what I am talking about? If you believe this lie, you are deceived, and the truth will be known when Christ begins to appear in His people in full stature.
He is appearing already, He is appearing today, but when we start to see manifestations of His life in full stature, and you are sitting home in your house, saying, "I have it too," and nothing is happening in your life, the Scripture says you will be ashamed, and the reason you will be ashamed is that you have believed the lie of the pride of your own mind.
It is fallen man who wants to be clean. It is our own heart that has trouble admitting that we deserve to die because our heart is desperately wicked, and that God is rich in mercy, that He would give us a new heart, so that in that death we could be raised from the dead. Everybody okay? Can you see this? You were at brother Peter's last time, were you not? I remember you, yes. Do you have anything else for us today?
COMMENT: I know you have said something in the line that I am bringing up again. The difficulty we have amongst us is how to reconcile our physical existence to the eternal workings of God. From generations past, people have been dying and dying, people of God. Up to this generation I discovered that people amongst us, those who are calling on the name of God, crying day and night for this deliverance, some along the line drop this physical body, they die.
There is a problem reconciling this death. If this person who has not been perfected, who is hoping to be perfected, and crying unto God for this deliverance unto perfection dies away from this physical body, what happens, what happens after dropping this body? Does the work continue on to get him up to God, or everything terminates when this physical body dies? I do not know if you are getting what I am saying, because if that is so what happens to those who have died before now, who, in earnest, have actually been wanting to know God, to be like Him, yet they did not while they were in this physical body, but they died, what happens to them?
PASTOR VITALE: That is a good question. You know, many people have this question, unsaved people have this question. To date, the church has not really had the answer for them, and I will try to explain it to you.
As I said earlier, this physical body is just a garment, it is just a dress . Well, first of all, if it dies, it dies because it has sin in it, it has sin in it. That is why it dies. The spirit goes back to the Father to appear in the last day on the earth as Elijah did in the man John the Baptist, but there is another side to it which is I think is what you want to hear.
People feel, "Well we have worked so hard, we have labored and was it all for nothing, was it all for nothing?" No, it was not for nothing because the blessings of God as well as the curses go along generational lines. The blessings of God as well as the curses go along generational lines, the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, but the blessings of God shall be visited upon the children unto two thousand generations.
Your children, brethren, your children, will reap what you have sown in this life. If you have done all that you could do, and your body passes away because it is not yet the time for the resurrection of the dead, your children will reap the good things that you have sown. Can you hear that?
I was speaking to my parents before I left on this trip. My parents are not believers, and they are having a lot of trouble with me and my life, and I am the only one in my family, so I had breakfast with them before I left, and my father does not talk very much. He is a very quiet man, and he asked me questions that he had never asked me before, because at this point he sees that I am not turning back, so he wants to share somewhat in what I am doing.
As I explained things to him, he told me that he had a friend fifty years ago, in his words, that was into this, and as he spoke, the Lord said to me, "That man prayed for him, for my father day and night for years, and the result of those prayers is that God raised me up, the next generation."
Now, I encourage you to not fall into the trap of thinking that you are losing something, or that you are being cheated because this body and this soul passes on. The reason we tend to think that, is that we have trouble perceiving ourselves as spiritual men, and the reason we have that problem is that our spiritual life is very immature. Everybody is very, very immature, and when we examine ourselves, we are mostly soul in this hour, so we have trouble thinking of ourselves as spirit.
Now, if I could use myself as an example for you, if the Lord were to take me today, my spiritual contribution that I was permitted to contribute to the Kingdom of God will go on forever. I have 350 recorded messages, 450 90 minute cassette tapes of teaching, the likes of which you are hearing here. This body would die, this soul would die, but that which God did through me, my spiritual life, would be eternal in this world system. It would be passed from generation to generation, and the effect that I have on each of you by my ministry to you will live forever through your descendants.
If you want to move into the Kingdom, you have to start sowing into the Kingdom. Now, just ask God what He wants you to do. You cannot do it of yourself. It is your spiritual life that goes on, it is not the life of this body, and it is not the works of your hands, you see. Do you understand what I am saying, that the reason people ...it is common everywhere, people tend to get distressed, "Well, what have I lived this life for, you know, what about all the problems I have overcome and all the good things that I have done? What was it all for?"
The answer to that question is, that there is a spiritual man in the earth, a many-membered man. His name at the beginning was Adam, the living soul, but when he grows up, his name is going to be Christ, the quickening spirit.
Just as you have had many experiences at different times of your life, each day of your life is an experience, each year of your life is an experience. Each aspect of your life is an experience, 9 years old, 10 years old, child, adult, mother, father, soldier, every aspect of your life has produced what I see here today.
This spiritual man is having many such experiences in a many-membered company of people. He is having these experiences simultaneously. It is like saying, "I was a superior being and I was experiencing my 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th year all at once." What we are, the spiritual reality of what we are, is the Lord Jesus Christ's immaturity. The mentality that thinks...and I am not criticizing anybody, but you have to hear this because we have to grow up, the mentality that says, "I want to be remembered as I am now," and that is what you are saying, amen?
That mentality is a mentality of a ten year old child saying, "I will not give up my dolls, I will not go to boarding school, I will not get married, I am going to stay...." My daughter said to me when she was a little girl, "I am never going to leave you, I am going to get married and live downstairs in the basement." That is what she said to me.
That is what we are saying to God, and there is no way we are going to stop saying this until we understand that we are sent here. We are very little guys, God loves us, but be very careful that you do not get puffed up because God loves you. He loves you, but He is all that there is, and everything that we have gone through, and everything that we have done, and everything that we have experienced is that He should be glorified in us. He is going to bring our spirit to maturity, whether we agree or not, and the world and the church does not agree.
Now, we found in a study about six months ago that when the creation fell at the beginning of time, He fell as a result. Well, part of the fall was that He had a great shock. You see there was a creation, it was called the living soul, and there was a mind in that creation, and the name of that mind was Christ. He was an immature mind, like us at five years old, if not less, and He had a great shock, and that shock...and I will tell you what it is in a minute, that shock resulted in this death which we call the fall. When He died the creation fell, and that shock resulted in Him breaking down into a multiple personality.
Has anyone here had some psychology courses? He broke down into a multiple personality. We are a spiritual multiple personality, only every personality has its own body. Now remember, everything that exists in this world exists in the realm of the spirit, but it exists on a lower level down here.
We know that a man can have a multiple personality, two, three, five, some people have had up to twenty or more personalities. Well, the living soul had a bad shock. He was frightened to death, He died, and He broke down into a multiple personality, and that is what we are. Christ is not divided, only the fallen creation is divided.
We are divided by our bodies, we are divided by our souls which are our personalities, which by nature are saying, "me," and I will defend me, and you will defend you, and sometimes we have wars, and sometimes we have spats. We are a divided creation because we are fallen. In Christ there is no division. In this hour, God is reconciling the whole, all of us, we are coming back into one. There will be no more separation between you and any other human being including your offspring who is going to be reaping everything that you have sown.
We have these problems because we are divided, and we are fallen, and all of these problems, this fear of not being appreciated, or recognized, or going down in history, or not going down in history, all of that will disappear when the creation is brought into one in Christ. When the mind of Christ is manifesting in full maturity in every human being on the face of the earth, there will be no more division in mind, and then the next stage is to deal with our bodies. Eventually, there will be no more bodies.
These are walls, these bodies are walls. We are going to be cities dwelling without walls, we are just going to be one city.
Anybody know the name of the city? New Jerusalem, one city, a high and great mountain, high and great nation, and upon that a great city. The soul, the mind, is the mountain which is high and great, that is the mind of Christ, and the city that He will dwell in, this many-membered soul which will be one, no longer divided, is the New Jerusalem.
This kind of problem is a problem that is common to all men, and the solution to the problem is an understanding that we must give up our childhood within us. Oh, I did not tell you what the shock is. Well, the Lord has revealed to us, let me repeat this, I know I said it to you before. He formed a soul, a soul which is spiritually female, and He put a mind in that soul. Now, let me remind you that the animals are soul. Do you know the animals have a soul?
Yes, man is a soul that has a mind, and mind is spirit. Animals do not have a spirit. God put a mind in the creation, and it was a righteous mind. It was the mind of Christ, but it was an immature mind that was capable of being killed. Now a lot of people get all upset when they hear this.
Listen carefully. I want to tell you that the immature Christ was capable of being killed, but that the mature Christ as we see demonstrated in Jesus, The Christ, is undefeatable, and the shock that the creation had was that He thought He was undefeatable. We know that the young creation had a problem with pride right? He thought He was undefeatable, and God said to the man, He said, "You can eat of any of the trees in the Garden, but of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, do not, because if you eat of it you are going to die," and He died.
He found out that He was not undefeatable, and that death, spiritually speaking, we found...I brought all the tapes, sister xxxxx has all the tapes, we found that in the Scripture, specifically in Daniel 8 when we looked up every word in the Hebrew, we found out that, that death can be likened to a castration.
If you look into any of the psychological studies on multiple personality, you will find out that it is a very common result of a male fear of castration that can result in the personality breaking down into a multiple personalities. It is something that is just built into all men, and it goes back to the beginning of time. Why?
Because the mind of Christ was the manhood of the creation, and when the creation died, when that mind of Christ died and the mind became death, the creation became female. The creation was castrated, and the shock of it broke it down into many members.
Of course, I am simplifying it. That was what happened there. Did I answer your question? I just feel to repeat this again. The mind that is in the creation makes the creation either male or female, and the mind that is in an individual makes you either male or female. In some religious churches, they will tell you that a woman cannot teach a man. Well, that is true. The Bible says that, but the question is, who is the woman and who is the man?
Brethren, when I am up here, and Christ is speaking through me, I am a man to you. You have to stop looking at people's bodies.
Now, of course, in your marriages, we go with physical beings because marriage is a physical covenant. The man is the head of the wife, and he is the head of his family, women submit to your husbands, but in spiritual things, the determination as to whether or not you are a man depends on the mind that is manifesting through you.
The mind that was in the creation at the beginning of time was male, and it was killed by the carnal mind. The carnal mind was brought forth illegally by Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, in the early creation and killed that immature manifestation of Christ, and the reason it could do that is this...I cannot leave you in the middle with this. Have you heard the Scripture that says a three-fold cord is not easily broken?
Well, let us talk about what it means. A three-fold cord is referring to a creation which has been brought forth from seed. You have a male seed, and you have a female seed, and they join together, and they produce a third entity, a baby. You have a male seed, you have a female seed, and science tells us that in conception the two seeds join so completely they become one seed, the first cell of the new baby.
This is what happened in the mind of the man, Jesus of Nazareth. He said, I am the Son of God, and I am the Son of man. Jesus was not confused. It was not that He could not make up His mind who He was the Son of. What He was saying is this, my mind, the mind that you see in me, the mind that permits me to do miracles, the mind that brought forth such righteousness that the Father raised...will be raising you from the dead, this mind is the product of the male seed of the Father, and the female seed that I am as a human being, and every other human being on the face of the earth has a mind which is the product of Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, as the male seed, and female seed which we are, and, therefore, our mind is death, and our mind is female.
In case there are any women's libbers here, I am certainly not against women. These are spiritual principles in the Scripture. Female is weak, and male is strong. We are talking about spiritual things, we are not talking about your culture.
If you have problems in your life, it is because your mind is weak, and I do not insult you, I tell you the truth. Petition the Lord to strengthen your mind in Him, and you will overcome all things.
At the beginning of time, we had a formation of Christ which was not a three-fold cord. He was a two-fold cord. There was no joining of the seed of the Father with the creation. There was just a relationship, and the Scripture says the Father stood the man upright, He imputed righteousness to him. The man did not deserve righteousness, he had not earned righteousness. He was like a seven year old boy that became king simply because his father died, and he was the son. He had no knowledge, he had no wisdom, he had no experience, and he was weak. He could not even obey the commandments of God.
The example the Lord has given us, is as if a man were to appear right in this room, he was not born from seed, he did not have a mother, he did not have a father, he had no upbringing, he was not taught right from wrong, he was not taught to speak language, he was not taught how to relate to man, he was not taught any social rules, he just appeared, and he was a big man, physically strong, and his mind could not sustain him in this world. He had no skills to get a job, had no skills of how to survive or even feed himself, he knew nothing.
That was the creation at the beginning of time, and God said to him, "I am going to impute righteousness to you so that you can live, and I am going to provide all of your needs. I am going to give it to you like a bird in the cage, I am going to give you water, and I am going to give you bird seed, and I am going to give you everything you need. Just do not eat of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you are okay."
"And as time goes by, I am going to give you experiences, and I am going to teach you how to abide in the realm of the spirit and not be destroyed, and when you are old enough, I will let you out of the cage." Of course, I am exaggerating that, that is what God said to him.
Adam disobeyed God and he died. He was a two-fold cord, he was not brought forth from seed, he had no experiences, he was a baby in the carriage, and with his first encounter with evil, that evil killed him.
In this hour, brethren, God is bringing forth from seed, all of us. We are having experiences in Christ. We are not robots. I said this earlier. God is not saying, "Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not."
God is saying, "Lend yourself to study, study to show yourself approved. Learn, do not be afraid to have spiritual experiences, speak in tongues, prophesy, exercise your discernment, discern the angel of light, discern the true prophet of God, look for sin in your own mind. I give you responsibilities, saith the Lord, I give you responsibilities, saith the Lord, you shall not be robots in my Kingdom, saith God, but you shall be true sons that exercise the power of my spirit, saith the Lord, but you must be trained, and you must be cleansed, and you must be purged. Submit to me, saith the Father, and I shall raise you up, saith God, and no man, and no spirit shall bring you down."
Natural Israel had a manifestation of Christ which was a two-fold cord. They had Christ, they went into battle, no one was even wounded, no one even got sick. They had a greater anointing than is in the church today. A lot of people do not like to hear that, but it is the truth.
They had more power than we have today, but God just gave it to them. They did not earn it, it was not a part of their experience, it was a gift without repentance, and what happened? The mind and the wicked heart that they were born with rose up and killed it, just like happened at the beginning of time. In this dispensation, brethren, this will not happen because there is a Christ that is coming forth in God's creation today that is begotten of the Father.
The Lord Jesus Christ is joining with the hearts of men and, brethren, this is what the crowns are. If you look up that Greek word that is translated crownlets, it is not a European crownlets which is gold with the peaks on it. It is a Greek crownlets. It is the kind of crownlets that Jesus had on with the twigs interwoven with one another, and what it stands for is the interweaving of the mind of Christ with your carnal mind, and that is your three-fold cord, the birthing of Christ in you, not the imputation of Christ to you, as a gift without repentance that can be lost.
Did you ever hear a couple of Christians have an argument about "once saved always saved." Did you ever hear that here? You know almost any argument you hear about in the church, both people are right, because under this set of circumstances, this is true, and under this set of circumstances, that is true. You are both right, you have to check out your circumstances. You can lose your salvation under such and such a set of circumstances, but once Christ is fully born in you, you cannot lose it, a three-fold cord, Christ in you the hope of glory.
This time, Christ will not die, but He will rise up as a great tree, and He will defeat The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in your own heart. He will tear down your carnal mind, and He will rule the Garden as God commanded Him to do at the beginning of time. He will guard the Garden of your heart, and no weeds will ever grow there again, because the three-fold mind of Christ has the spiritual strength because of, very important, because of experience and teaching, He will never be defeated again.
The whole world knows that. You give a man a political office, you give him the kingdom, you give him a family when he is not ready for it, you give him a beautiful gift, they are sure to fall away, we know that. You give somebody a million dollars, will it make them rich? It depends on the man.
We have the lottery in the United States. Do you know, I think it is forty-nine out of fifty people that have won a million dollars, and ten years later they are bankrupt. They did not know what to do with the money. You must have teaching, you must have experience, you cannot help people by just giving them...you give to them, but they must be trained as to what to do with it, and this is true of the Holy Ghost.
God has given the Holy Ghost to the church, but the hour of the training up of the sons is at hand. Present yourself. It is not easy, but you can do it. Glory to God.
COMMENT: My question is in relation to the resurrection of the dead. The Bible says that when Christ rose up from the dead, some dead saints were seen in Jerusalem. I would like your explanation of that Scripture.
PASTOR VITALE: Brethren, we are a spiritual people. God is spirit, and we have to start comprehending these Scriptures by His spirit. There is a letter of the word, and there is a spirit of the word, and the letter does what to you? It kills you.
I want to suggest to you that, that appearance of the saints was seen in a vision, that the centurion was having a vision. If you recall that Scripture, the first thing that it said was there was an earthquake, that he saw an earthquake. Well, you cannot see an earthquake, and from my years of study, the Lord has showed me that an earthquake in the Scripture typifies a piercing through of one realm into another.
There was a vision, the spiritual realm was opened to the centurion. There was an earthquake, and the spirit of God appeared to show him a sight, and then we are told that the veil of the temple was rent from the top to the bottom.
Sister, the centurion was on Golgotha hill. There was no way he could have seen what was happening inside of the temple. He was seeing a vision of spiritual things, and that rending of the veil, it was the veil of Jesus Christ's carnal mind. It was all symbolic . Whether or not the veil in the actual temple rent, I really do not know. It may have, but I believe that anything that happens in the natural is just an expression, and what really counts is what happens in the spiritual. Can you say "amen," that he was having a vision? He was having a vision.
Then another thing that we hear is that those that were, I believe it says in the bosom of Abraham, rose from the dead and walked in the streets of Jerusalem. Well, we were just talking about Jerusalem a while ago. Let me remind you, there is an old Jerusalem, and there is a New Jerusalem. The Scripture does not say whether it is the old or the New Jerusalem.
Those in New York that attend my regular meetings, we know that because God has been teaching us for a long time now, that we must be very careful to watch for the modification of terms. We do not know whether the intent of the Holy Spirit in that Scripture is the New Jerusalem or the old Jerusalem, but it is very important that we understand that it could be the New Jerusalem. It does not have to be the old Jerusalem, but we have the whole church world just assuming that it is the old Jerusalem.
I want to suggest to you that it is the New Jerusalem, and I want to suggest to you that the centurion saw a vision of the man Jesus' carnal mind. Are we not the temple of the Holy Ghost? Our carnal person...the temple of the Holy Ghost, the centurion saw a vision of the carnal person that Jesus inherited from His mother, Mary. He was a man, right? He had everything that we have, plus He was the son of God.
He saw that rent and destroyed, and the result, or one of the long range results of what happened to Jesus on the cross is that all those spirits, the spirit of Elijah, the spirit of Abraham, the spirit of all of the faithful men whose body and souls died because they were still in sin, those spirits appeared in the New Jerusalem in that last day, just as our example, Elijah, appeared in John the Baptist.
I am going to say it again. I know I did not make it that clear. Let me say it again. What I am suggesting to you is that the centurion saw a vision two thousand or more years in the future, because what happened on the cross was that the provision was made to permit the spirits of the faithful men of God to appear on the earth in an uncorrupted New Jerusalem in that last day.
He was prophesying, the centurion was prophesying. Can you hear that? You do not have to believe me, but do you understand what I said?
COMMENT: Sorry, it is not very clear to me because the Bible says that many bodies of the sleeping saints were raised. I believe it was, well, Matthew Chapter 27, Verse 53 says, "And coming forth from the tombs after His resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." I think the centurion saw all this. It says that many bodies of the sleeping saints were raised. Are you now saying that it was a spiritual thing, that all the people were seeing a vision? Is that what you are saying?
PASTOR VITALE: I am saying that the centurion prophesied a future event, a future event, and the bodies of the saints...now the bodies of the saints, the body is the...it could mean the soul. I would have to look at it in the Greek. It could mean the soul or the physical body. The body was raised from the dead. The only body that I know of that was ever raised from the dead was the Lord Jesus Christ, and I am suggesting to you that, that has not happened yet. I do have a message on that Scripture, if you want to study it. It is coming in the future, it is in the process of happening now.
Let me remind you that the saints that are sleeping are Abraham and Elijah, and the example we have is that Elijah appeared again in a new body and new soul, and that prophecy says that the bodies of the saints were raised from the dead. That is talking about what is about to happen in this generation.
Let me just pray a minute and ask God to help me make it clearer. Are you upset? You are upset at what I am saying, let me pray for you. Do not be embarrassed.
PRAYER
"Father, in the name of Jesus, there is no glory for you in the rejection of your truth because of fear. I just rebuke carnal minds, I rebuke every spirit that would steal anything you have for any of these blessed people here. Father, I pray for a powerful outpouring of your spirit, I pray for truth, I pray that if I am wrong that you reveal it, that only your truth and your glory be exposed Father, and for this one I especially pray that you have mercy on her Lord, because I do not know how I would react if someone came in "out of the blue" and dumped this on me. This is very powerful doctrine, have mercy on her Lord, there is no glory in it to you."
We did find a second witness to this. To be honest with you, I do not remember where it is. This is all on a tape, and I could locate the teaching for you. We are starting with Verse 50, Matthew, Chapter 27, "Jesus, when He cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost." Now let me just re-emphasize to you that this is the most significant part of what we are talking about. Jesus yielded up the ghost, and what happened on the cross, we are told in another place, is that of the twain, He made one New Man.
Of what twain? Twain meaning two, of His two minds, of the mind He inherited from His mother which was carnal, and the mind which He inherited from the Father. They were joined in crucifixion, killing the carnal mind, leaving only righteousness present, and the Father raised Him from the dead and, because of this work, in this hour it is now possible for the Holy Spirit to be in the process of being poured out upon all men. Everybody alright with that?
We are going to see that the centurion is going to get a vision of what this means to future generations.
Verse 51. "And behold the veil of the temple was rent." The temple. Jesus said, "I am the temple." Did he not say, "I am the temple?" The veil which was the carnal mind that He inherited from His mother within the man Jesus was rent from the top to the bottom, and the earth of the man Jesus' soul did quake and the rocks rent. Now, brethren, this may have happened in the natural, I do not know, but I know that this Scripture has a deep meaning that is speaking about the experience of the man Jesus.
Rocks, rocks in the Scripture, anybody know what rocks in the Scripture typify? Spirit, they typify spirit, and I want to suggest to you the rocks that were rent typified the carnal mind that Jesus inherited from His mother. You have heard that elements will melt? Have you not heard that? This fallen carnal mind that we have, it is spirit. It is typified by rock, and it has three parts to it. It has the male seed which is Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, it has the female seed which is the human spirit, and it has the offspring which is the carnal mind.
One of the stages of the resurrection of the dead that we will all be experiencing is the renting or the ripping apart of the rocks. We have a carnal mind that has three parts. It must separate, and God is going to deal with each of the three elements in a specific way after He brings the separation.
Jesus is our example. He was a man just like we are, and what happened to Him will be happening to us. I am continuing to suggest to you that the centurion had a vision of what was happening to the spiritual being of the man Jesus.
We all saw, everyone who was there saw, what was physically happening to Him, and God wanted the world to know what was spiritually happening to Him, so He gave the man a vision, and we can take this word on the letter, and I am sure we can reap some good things out of it, but there is no eternal life in it. I cannot say there is nothing good in the letter. The Scripture says the letter kills, the letter kills Christ in you, but you can reap good things for this existence. Are you all okay? Is this too much for you? Are you all okay?
You can take the letter of the Scripture, and it is okay, but it will not produce the life of Christ in you. What I am doing here today is ministering to you out of Christ in me, and God's purpose in this ministry is to reproduce Christ in you, to start Him functioning in you, to start your thought process coming forth out of Christ instead of your carnal mind. That is what God is doing today. He is stimulating you, and sometimes this stimulation causes distress, like our sister was feeling, because God touched her. He must have touched her in some way, and her carnal mind went into a little bit of confusion there.
I mentioned to you earlier that this exchange of minds, this giving up of the carnal mind and starting to live out of Christ, I told you it is painful. We saw an example of it today, and I praise God that the sister was honest with me, and let me pray for her. Some people just go home and go away. Do not ever do that. Work it out. There will be stress, there will be strain, there will be great distress in your city as this exchange of minds takes place, as God moves upon you to cause you to think with His mind and not your carnal mind. It is likened to the stress of childbirth, and that distress is in your emotions.
Those of you ladies who have had babies, you know the distress is not just physical, it is an emotional distress, and a lot of the doctrine that is coming forth in Christ may cause you emotional distress. Do not run from it, do not run away, face it, go before God and tell Him, you are distressed, but you will not fear, you want the truth. He is able, and He is faithful if you do not panic. Do not panic, do not panic. We are moving into deep waters. God is faithful, and He is able to sustain you.
Fear is never of God, never, never, never, never. You should be able to study out every teaching, go before the Father, pray about it, ask questions, do every legitimate thing available to you to determine the truth, believing that He will bring you into all truth as He has promised. If you run because of fear, it is never God. Never.
I will take this opportunity to say this. I find a lot of people in the United States have a wrong understanding that we are saved by doctrine, and when they hear something that upsets them, they run away because they think they are going to lose their salvation.
Brethren, we are not saved by doctrine, we are not saved by doctrine, and our salvation is not lost by doctrine. Our salvation is in union with the living Christ, and if you are living and walking in a vital union with the living Christ, He will cleanse you of all unrighteousness and every false doctrine that you may have picked up, He will purge from you. Do not run in fear. I encourage you to stand in faith.
Let us try and go on. I am suggesting to you that these Scriptures, let me just put it on the tape. We are in Matthew 27:50, that the vision that the centurion had, or that the subsequent verses are a vision that the centurion had which described what happened to Jesus spiritually. The veil of His human temple was rent from the top to the bottom, and the earth of His soul was quaking, and the rocks of His carnal mind separated, and they were dealt with, each element in His own specific formula.
Verse 52, "And the graves were opened." Now brethren, the graves that we live in are these bodies. Our spirit is dead, and it is buried under the earth of our souls, and it is in a grave that is this body. Jesus clearly told the Pharisees that they were walking sepulchers. When the Scripture says the graves were opened, this is speaking about the deliverance from the bondage to this flesh.
Now that has not happened yet, except for one man. I honestly do not recall if this word "graves" in the Greek is plural or not. I do not remember. If it is not plural, then it was speaking only about the man Jesus. If the word in the Greek is plural, it is including, I think it is plural if I remember correctly, it is speaking about all of the human beings who will share a like experience that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, experienced, and sister that has not happened yet. It is our hope, it has not happened yet, but it is going to happen I believe in our lifetime, and I pray that you are one of the people that it happens to. Are you feeling better? You look better.
The graves were opened. That means the spiritual man was released from the jail house of this body, and the many bodies of the saints which slept, arose. Well, if this body is a grave, how could the body of the saints arise? Because if you do a study on the usage of the Greek word which is translated "body," you will find, probably more often than not, it is used to describe the soul.
Paul said that we have a celestial body, and he said that we have a terrestrial body. Here we go with our principle of modification again. When you see the word body, you have to say, "Father, what kind of body?" I am suggesting to you that this is a mysterious Scripture that is imparted to us in a parable form, the resurrection of the dead.
You know, most Christians know that there is a resurrection of the dead. The mystery is, how will it happen? That is the mystery. In this hour, it is not for everyone to know. Now God is not a respecter of persons, but He is a God of order. He is not taking the masses all at once, we will trample each other. He did it with one man. Did he not start with Abraham? One man. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then He expanded to twelve, and then from twelve He went to thousands, perhaps millions.
We have a similar situation here. He started with one man, His name is Jesus. He is the seed that we hear about in the Book of Galatians, and now He is expanding. The next stage will be a company of human beings who will share a life experience with Jesus of Nazareth.
I do not believe our physical bodies will be crucified, but our spiritual experience will be...I cannot tell you it is going to be exactly the same, because I do not know, but I think it probably will be. After this first fruit company is raised from the dead, it is this gift of God, of salvation, the resurrection of the dead and the salvation of our soul is going to be imparted to whoever is alive on the face of the earth in that hour. He is doing it in stages.
Did Jesus not tell the people to sit down on the ground in companies, in groups? He is a God of order.
This is going to be done, each man in his own order, one man at a time. He may be dealing with many at one time, but it is happening one man at a time. We are each having our own experience, our own salvation experience, our own experience with the Holy Ghost, our own experience of resurrection.
I am suggesting to you that Verse 52 is a mysterious, hidden way of saying that the graves are open, the physical bodies, or that the souls will be released from physical bodies and that the celestial bodies of the saints which slept, arose in the saints which are sleeping. I remind you, our spirit, we have gone over that a couple of times today, and if their souls are rising, what that means is that they are appearing in a body again, in a soul again, just like Elijah appeared in John the Baptist. That is what it means. They are going to appear on the earth again.
Brethren, I want to tell you a very exciting thing if you can receive it, receive it.
In this hour, all of the great men of God are appearing in the church. How will you know? Look at their spiritual works, what are their contributions to the Kingdom? Now, do not let my teaching be a snare unto you, do not let your pride or anyone else's pride get a hold of it, but if you seek the truth, look at people who do have an obvious spiritual life, and ask the Father to help you understand what their role in the Kingdom is and maybe the Father will tell you who they are a manifestation of. Can you hear what I am saying? Just watch that pride, it will kill you. Watch your pride, it will kill you.
Let us see if there is anything else we can have here. "And they came out of their graves after His resurrection." Well, brethren, we are coming out of our graves, after His resurrection two thousand years later. "And they went into the holy city," which I suggest to you is New Jerusalem, and I am going to tell you why. Look at that, it does not say Jerusalem. It says holy city. Well, we know that Jerusalem was not holy. Jerusalem was filled with sin, the natural Jerusalem.
If this is holy Jerusalem, it has to be the glorious Jerusalem that is descending from God out of heaven.
If we take it a word and a phrase at a time, these mysteries in this hour really are decipherable. It is very exciting, is it not? God did not intend to confound us. It is not His intention to confound us. It is just that there is a time for everything.
Daniel was told to seal up the book because it was not time, but the truth is there at the moment that the Father will enlighten your eyes to see it. All of the clues, and all of the witnesses that you need are here. You should never believe a revelation without Scriptural proof, but you may have to ask the Father to open your spiritual eyes to see the Scriptural proof, but you should have at least two Scriptural references for anything I or anybody else tells you, and if I tell you something, and you cannot believe it, well, maybe you need some time. Just do not worry about it.
Just pray and say, "Father if it is true, I would like to believe it," and forget about it. Maybe the Lord has to teach you something else first, so that you can understand this.
In this hour, God is training everybody up on a very personal, individual program, even though I come in here, and I am ministering to you as a group. Besides this, each of you will need emphasis in different areas, and that will either come from your personal relationship with the Lord, or He may move upon you to ask me a question, an individual question, either in the group or after the group. Maybe you just need a specific word that is going to quicken it to you.
You know, a long time ago, about eight years ago, I was studying one evening in my home, and the spirit of God came upon me, and started impressing me to telephone a sister that was a member of the church that I was attending, and I said, "No, this cannot be the Lord, it is a Saturday night and she is a married woman, and they must be entertaining, this cannot be God," but He was so strong on me, I could not resist, and when I telephoned her, none of what I thought was true. She was studying on a Saturday night, and she was asking the Lord a question that He had just taught me the answer to.
She wanted to know who the locusts of Revelation 9 were, and when I told her she did not like my answer. Two years later she came to me, now hear this, two years later...she rejected what I told her, and two years later she came to me and said, "Sister Sheila, I have to tell you that the Lord has witnessed what you told me to be true, but in my case I had to hear it a certain way for me to believe it." He took her along a particular path and showed her the Scriptures that she needed, and two years later she got the revelation.
Be at peace, be at peace. You are not saved by doctrine. Do not worry about any of this, be at peace. Anybody else? Did I answer your question? Anybody else?
COMMENT: I just thought we were going into Verse 54, because for me, that is just it, praise God. It says, "Now, when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus." You see, all that took place, they saw it while they were watching Jesus, Hallelujah. You know, they were just watching Jesus and they saw all that, you see. Oh glory to God, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done.
PASTOR VITALE: Praise God, they saw a vision, brethren, they saw a vision. Hallelujah, glory to God.
COMMENT: Praise the Lord. I want to ask a question to do with one of the areas. I know that the issue of resurrection has been quite a confusion to people. Apart from the issue of personality, there is this issue of the time, time in God's program, like when we talk about the resurrection, people's mind come to the millennium, and then we look at it and see, as if it is going to be 1995 or 1996, maybe October or so. I just want you to say one or two words in that direction, because my experience is that when there is no time frame, and when it is as if there is no name, say millennium or so, given to it, it is difficult for people to appreciate coming into resurrection life, so I do not know how you see this.
PASTOR VITALE: First of all, the resurrection is happening an individual at a time. It has already happened to one man, and there is not any specific date, like at twelve o'clock noon on Friday. That is not going to happen. Just like you receive the Holy Ghost individually, just like you came to a saving knowledge of the Lord individually, it is going to happen individually.
I believe it would be like a plant, a tomato plant. You watch your plant, you watch your plant, and then one morning you arise, and you see little green tomatoes on the plant. You keep going out every morning, and one morning one of the those tomatoes is ripe. What we are waiting for is the season, we are waiting for the season, and I believe that we are about to break through into that season at any moment. This is my opinion.
I encourage you that should the sign come to you that we have entered into the season, and you do not see yourself being raised from the dead at that moment, I encourage you to not despair, because just the fact that we have entered into the season is a time of rejoicing.
I would like to talk to you about the resurrection. Now the Lord has revealed to us that it comes in three stages, the resurrection comes in three stages. There is an evolution of resurrection, and the most obvious Scripture I can give you for that is that we did see a man, Jesus of Nazareth, in a fallen human body, but His mind was raised from the dead. How do I know? I know it because He said, "No man can take my life," because His mind was raised from the dead. It was preserving His soul and His body.
I saw that man, Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and raised from the dead in a new form. That which was sown, brethren, was not raised from the dead. He was raised a glorified man who was able to take the form of any man He wanted.
He certainly did not look like Jesus of Nazareth. He looked like one man on the road to Emmaus, and then He did take the form of Jesus of Nazareth just to show His wounds to Thomas, then He appeared on the beach cooking fish, and the Scripture says, "They knew it was the Lord, but it did not look like Him, but they knew it was Him, so they were afraid."
We see an evolution, we see an evolution of this man, and we do know that the Book of Revelation talks about a first resurrection, and most of the church including me, I was very carnal at one time. It is just a maturation, it is a growing up. Do not ever let anybody condemn you, it is just a growing up, that is all it is. Everyone will come in his own season.
I used to believe....well, it means the first group of people that are getting on the life boat, that is the first resurrection, right?
No, it does not mean that. It really is a hidden way of saying, the first stage of resurrection, and I cannot tell you that I have actually looked the word up in the Greek, but I would be inclined to believe that if I looked up that Greek word translated "the first," and I looked in my expanded dictionary which is Thayer's lexicon, that is the one that I use, I would really expect to find a note from the author saying that in its usage, in its established usage, this word has been translated "the first stage," because the Lord has told me that the correct translation is, "the first stage of the resurrection," and this is the first stage of the resurrection.
"I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for Christ." He did not see the bodies, did not see the bodies. He saw the souls of them that had lost their head. Now, how can a soul have a head? What is the name of the head of your soul right now? Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind. We do not like to admit it, but we will not tell anybody outside of this room.
Brethren, if you want to get a new head, if you want Christ to be your head, your existing head has to be cut off. The living soul is going to get castrated all over again, and this time we are going to be raised from the dead. this is the first stage of the resurrection from the dead. Well, Satan, in the form of the unconscious part of your carnal mind. Satan, in the form of a mind, is called the unconscious part of the carnal mind.
The Father, in the form of a mind, is called Christ. The first stage of the resurrection is that your carnal mind will be decapitated. It is going to be cut off, you are going to be beheaded. That is the first stage of the resurrection. The third stage of the resurrection is what we saw happen to Jesus on the cross, glorification, increased supernatural spiritual power.
We know, obviously, I just mentioned it, that He could take the forms of many different men, and not only could He take the forms of many different men, but I would like to suggest to you that He had no permanent resident form. He was not a magician or a witch doctor who had a name and a resident personality of this world, and because of potions, and drinking blood, and saying abracadabra, He could appear like another man in the other town, do his dirty work and revert back.
No, He had no resident personality. He was a ball of light, a glorified spirit that was one with the Father, who could take many forms of a lower life form, but He was no longer that lower life.
Where is the third stage of the resurrection at, of the second stage of the resurrection? This you are going to have to pray about because I have some proof, but it is not as obvious as the other two. Well, excuse me, sorry to whet your appetite like that.
I want to go back to the first stage of the resurrection. I am preaching, brethren, and there is not a doubt in my mind that God has shown me that the man Jesus was born a natural man, and that He was born with a carnal mind which He inherited from His mother, and a fallen body which He inherited from His mother who was fallen. I hope we all know that. We are not in the Catholic church here, right? Mary was not perfect, .
He was born a natural man just like us with one exception. He had something added to Him, He had something that we did not have, and what He was born with was the seed of the Father, the seed of the Father. He was born with what we in this room have now, but we were not born with it, the Holy Ghost. Our spiritual experience was imparted to us in our physical adulthood, but the man Jesus, He was the baby Jesus, He was born with it. He was born into an Orthodox Hebrew family, and at three years old, He began to be instructed in the Scriptures. He was dedicated in the temple.
I believe that His parents, on His behalf, complied with every letter of the law. He was brought up under the law, and at the exact time that the Father ordained it, that seed of the Father had grown into the mind of the Father.
Remember what we talked about earlier. The man Jesus had a mind which was a three-fold cord. If the man Jesus was born perfect, it would have left no room for Him to have experiences and training in God, I tell you the truth.
His mind became a three-fold cord. The seed of the Father was woven together with His carnal mind through the training of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Hebrew household to a certain, point and what that point was...I have some ideas, but I really do not know, and from that point forward He was taught of the spirit of God, the mind of God grew up from seed.
Does the Scripture not say He grew in grace? He grew. Brethren, eternal life does not grow. "Jesus Christ yesterday, today and forever, I am God, I change not." The fallen man, Jesus, He grew. I know this is a shocking thing to tell you because a lot of people will say it is blasphemy, but I declare unto you that there are blasphemies in the church.
I declare unto you that the doctrine in the church today is filled with blasphemy, and the example that I give you is the concept and the teaching that Jesus went down on His knees in the Garden of Gethsemane, and begged the Father to let the cross pass from Him. I declare to you, any man who would do that is a weak man. I want to tell you, if the Father speaks to you and says, "I have a job for you to do. I am going to crucify you because your death is going to produce the vessel that is going to save my entire creation, and I want you to submit to this crucifixion," that the man that gets down on His knees, that is so scared that He sweats blood, is a weak man.
I want to tell you that the Lord Jesus Christ had no weakness in Him. Now, do you hear what I am saying? The church will tell you that He was weak after His mind was Christ, and they will tell you He was strong when He was born. I want to tell you this, and if what I am telling you is true, that if the baby Jesus who was just a human baby that received the seed of the Father, just like us, that makes me want to jump up and down, because we are getting the same training that He got.
We have the Holy Ghost, we have the Scriptures, we have the teachings, we have the five- fold ministry, and if He overcame, we too shall overcome. The truth is going to set you free.
The second stage of the resurrection, the third and second stage of the resurrection took place, I suggest to you, in the Garden of Gethsemane. When the church world, and the King James Scriptures tells us that our God and Savior was so scared that He sweat His blood begging God to let Him out of His trial, and are we not lucky that God said "No?" He was God brethren, He was God.
You know the Scripture that says, "And He gave up the ghost." If you study that in the Greek, that Scripture clearly indicates that, that physical body that hung on the cross did not die until Jesus the Christ, until the Christ in the man willfully gave it up. He willed Himself out of that body, and this man was on the ground sniffling, so scared He was sweating blood?
We have to start thinking, we have to start thinking. Everyone of us is responsible for whatever our degree of contribution is to our resurrection from the dead. We have to grow up, we have to grow up.
You listen to every teaching that you hear, but do not just receive it, pray about it, think, ask the Lord questions. That is irrational.
We looked up every word in the Greek in the account of the Garden of Gethsemane where our Lord was supposedly such a "mamby pamby" that he cried blood or sweat blood, and we found out that it did not mean anything like that at all. We found out that it was the second stage of the resurrection.
Let me just back up a little to give myself some background here. We know that we are the temple of the Holy Ghost, right? We know that the seed of God entered into our heart and implants itself there, amen? Can we not say that the seed of Christ is growing inside of the heart of man? The seed of Christ is growing inside of our fallen heart.
The mind of Christ is maturing inside the spiritual womb of our carnal mind. The Scripture talks about the crushing of the grapes. The grape skins must be pierced for the wine of the life of God to flow out. I am suggesting to you that the grape skin typifies the carnal mind, and that the flesh of the grape typifies Christ. We see the mind of Christ inside of a membrane, a spiritual membrane, and I am suggesting to you that the second stage of the resurrection is the piercing through of that membrane which brought Jesus to a greater degree of spiritual power.
Now, He was God, from the moment that His mind was raised to the fullness of Christ and, of course, simultaneously therewith, or for His mind to be fully raised from the dead, His carnal mind had to become totally inoperable. There was no sin in it from that moment forward. Thank you Jesus.
What was I saying, do you remember what I was saying? Piercing the membrane, I was talking about the degrees of power, that is what I was talking about. I was saying that Jesus was raised from the dead from the moment that His mind became a fully mature Christ and, simultaneously, therewith His carnal mind became totally inoperable, and the natural example that we use is a bird.
When he is flying his legs are totally inoperable. There was a moment in the man Jesus' life that His carnal mind ceased to function, and the mind of Christ became His only functioning mind, and that was the moment of the first stage of the resurrection for the man Jesus. That mind of Christ was still inside of the membrane of the carnal mind.
The measure of power that we see in the first stage of resurrection was, basically, to heal, to deliver, to provide food, to raise from the dead. We do not see any aggressive spiritual, warfare authority coming forth. The only sign of aggression that I know of, of the man, Jesus the Christ, was the turning over of the tables of the money changers, but that was not a spiritual aggression. It was physical aggression.
We see no war-like authority in Him, yet we know that our God is the Lord of hosts. We know that in the back of the Book of Revelation, He goes forth to make war, He doth make war. As a matter of fact, this very principle caused the Jews to stumble. They said, "How could this be Christ, He rides on an ass, and He heals people's eyes, we want a warrior to deliver us from the Romans." It was this very fact that caused Israel to reject Him as Messiah.
I suggest to you that on His knees in the Garden, after looking up every word in the Greek, the Lord Jesus was saying to the Father, "May I pierce through this carnal mind, am I strong enough to do it? Do I have Your permission?" I remind you that Jesus said, "I do nothing but that which the Father tells me to do." I suggest to you the Father said,"Yes, it is time, do it."
I cannot quote you the exact Scripture, but the King James makes it sound like He was in terrible fear, He was in agony, and anguish. If you look that word up in the Greek, it can mean "an anguish of the mind, an extreme effort of the mind," which could be likened to a body builder straining to pick up a heavy barbell. In this agony of the mind, Christ pierced through the membrane, the spiritual birth, brethren, another stage of the spiritual birth, because the spirit in Him, the mind in Him that was raised from the dead was not fully born until it became a glorified spirit.
Brethren, this world is not real, the real world is the world of the spirit.
Jesus was not fully born into the realm of the spirit until His Father raised Him from the dead, spirit, soul, and body. We have to enter into the realm of the spirit. His spirit was raised from the dead in the first stage of the resurrection, and the resurrection of His spirit gave life to His soul and His body, but they were corrupted. He pierced through that membrane and, for the first time, immediately thereafter that piercing through, for the first time we see aggressive spiritual activity in the man Jesus.
The guards came looking for Him, and all He said was, "I am He," and they fell backwards. Well, why did that not happen before? My Bible tells me that when they came to throw Him off the cliff, He ran away from them, He hid himself, right? I suggest to you this is the second stage of resurrection, and I do have more information on it if the Lord lets me, just bear with me.
Then, the third stage of the resurrection you are aware of. To answer your question, I believe the mind of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, was raised from the dead, thus changing His name from Jesus of Nazareth to Jesus, The Christ, occurred at the moment of baptism. I have two tapes on it, I had anticipated a third tape. At this point, I do not know if the Lord will let me do it, but I have two tapes on it. It is called Jesus in the Jordan, and when we looked up everyone of those words in the Greek in the account of His baptism, and we found out that Jesus, the man, Jesus was not only water baptized.
First of all, we found out that He knew....when the man Jesus walked into the water, He was still a natural man, He was still a natural man, but He knew what was going to happen to Him, and He was praying for it. Brethren, if you want your mind raised from the dead, pray for it because the man Jesus was praying for it. Three things happened to Him in the Jordan. His body went down under the water. He was baptized with the Holy Spirit, His human spirit was raised from the dead, and He walked out of that water Jesus, the Christ.
I have given you a lot. Let us just wait a minute, there is a heavy anointing here.
Well, I really feel, I have given you a great deal. I will take a couple of questions if you have it, but I really feel to not saturate you anymore. Basically, the way the Lord revealed it to us about what the drops of blood were, we know that the life of Christ is typified by blood, and when we looked up all these words in the Greek, we found out that the carnal mind is portrayed to be a porous element, something through which moisture can pass, like a sponge.
If you drop water on the top of it, eventually it will appear on the bottom of the sponge, and the way the mind of Christ in the man Jesus penetrated that carnal mind was that, that mind which was in the form of blood oozed through the porous cover of the carnal mind, and as it oozed through, it appeared, the life of Christ appeared on the surface of the carnal mind as if it were great drops of...the Scripture says, clotted blood. That Greek word translated "blood," it is either the word that is translated drops or blood, specifically means "clotted blood," and the blood congealed on the surface, crushing the carnal mind.
Now before this happened, Christ was within the carnal mind controlling it to the point that it was incapable of sin from a passive position underneath. After the second stage of resurrection, the life of Christ oozed through, appeared on the surface of the carnal mind and clotted it over, weakening the carnal mind further.
Let me clarify that. The carnal mind was not capable of sin, but I declare to you His mouth could still speak, and that is what the temptation is all about. At the water baptism of Jesus, I just said I believe His mind was raised from the dead. What happened right after water baptism, He was driven into the wilderness by the spirit to be tempted of Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind. Satan where, where was Satan? He is the unconscious part of our carnal minds.
He was driven into the wilderness of the spiritual realm which exists in the soul, not the spiritual realm of God, to see if the carnal mind that the man Jesus inherited from His mother was really crippled. What I said was, that even though that carnal mind was crippled, so crippled that he could not make the man Jesus sin, his mouth was not crippled, because we heard a whole bunch of what he had to say in the temptation. He could still talk.
Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, could still talk, and the man whose mind was raised from the dead could still hear Him. How do I know? Jesus answered him, and I would like to tell you that this temptation is already starting in your life. If Christ is formed in you in any measure, it has already started. I touched on it earlier. It is the pride of your own mind saying that this is God.
Now hear this, and you have to discern the mind of God from the mind of your own prideful, carnal mind in your own mind, and when you start to take that victory, Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, in the form of the carnal mind in your wife, in your husband, in your children, in your child, in your loved one, in your best friend. No one is meaning to hurt you, they are not knowing that they are doing it even though they are doing it, and that is the danger. They are your best friend, and they love you, and they have no idea what is coming out of their mouth. You are the prophet that must answer to God for your life.
In the first stage of the resurrection, even after we have been raised to full stature, we can hear the voice of Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, and we have no spiritual warfare authority. We are a doer of good works. Jesus of Nazareth went everywhere doing good. In the second stage of the resurrection, we see a clotting over, the Scripture describes as a clotting over of the carnal mind, a further crushing of the carnal mind. I cannot honestly tell you whether or not it blocked out his words, because I do not have any Scripture on it, I do not know.
All I know is that clotting over of the carnal mind imparted a spiritual war-like capacity to the man Jesus, the Christ, and then following thereafter, almost immediately, He was crucified and raised from the dead and fully alive. The spirit of God is the Lord of hosts.
Who was His enemy? Was His enemy your brother, is the enemy the man who cheated you down at the store, is the enemy another nation, is the enemy another race? His enemy is the carnal mind of man, and we have a whole world stumbling over the warfare Scripture, saying, "What kind of a loving God would do that to people?"
Brethren, He is going to do that to your carnal mind. The Lord Jesus Christ has one enemy, the carnal mind, wherever he is manifesting, and there will be warfare between the mind of Christ wherever He is manifesting, and the carnal mind wherever he is manifesting. That warfare will be of long duration, but if you do not faint, the end of it is the resurrection. Did I answer your question?
COMMENT: Please could you say something about Joel, Chapter 2, that talks about the great army that goes forth to devour everything before them, in the day of the Lord.
PASTOR VITALE: Is that the Scripture that says your sons and daughters will prophesy? (Joel Chapter 2, Verse 28) That is the one yes. We have that too, we have a tape, we have an Alternate Translation on that, and when we looked up every word in the Hebrew with those Scriptures, we found something very interesting, and what we found out was that it appears in the King James translation that the Scripture repeats itself.
I believe the repetition is, "I will raise your sons and daughters from the dead." Is that said twice? "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh," that is what it says twice. The Holy Spirit does not stutter, the Holy Spirit does not stutter. The Holy Spirit says it twice. It means something, and it is not likely that it means the same thing both times. Well, we looked up every word in the Hebrew, and we found out something very interesting, that there is going to be two outpourings.
Now I do not know about you, but I was taught that the first, the early rain, was Israel, and that the latter rain is the church. Is that what you were taught? That is what I was taught. No, we found out that the early rain is the five-fold ministry that exists today.
Did it ever break your heart because you do not have an answer as to why so few people are Christians? Did you ever get discouraged because someone came to you and said, "It is two thousand years after His resurrection, where is the promise of His coming? Why are there so few people getting saved?"
Then carnal churches stand up, and the carnal church stands up and says, "Well they are just dirty, no good sinners and God is going to burn them in hell forever, and they rejected Jesus." The man who said, "Forgive your enemy and if he hits one cheek, turn the other cheek," that is the God that is going to burn you in hell forever because you rejected Him?
Now we have to start analyzing these teachings, brethren. Well, we found out that the first outpouring of his Spirit, known as the early rain, raised up the existing five-fold ministry which, as we said earlier, is quite imperfect, including me. Please do not idolize me, because I want to tell you right now, anybody that idolizes me, I reject your idolatry, and what that means is...well, let me put it this way.
Any minister has an opportunity to receive or reject idolatry. If I receive your idolatry, that is the end of me. If I reject your idolatry, it is the end of you, and I am going to reject your idolatry, so you better not idolize me.
I am a human being, I have imperfections. If you count on me for everything, I am sure to let you down. I tell you the truth, God has given me a great anointing, but I am just as fallen as you are. I have problems, I have warfare, I have trials, I am not the answer to any of your problems. Jesus is the answer to your problem.
The first outpouring has raised up this imperfect five-fold ministry which has been given the gifts and the calling of God without repentance, and they have a function. Believe it or not, two thousand years of this imperfect ministry had the function of producing ...I think it was more than two thousand years ago. How long did natural Israel exist before they went into captivity in Babylon? It is probably three or four thousand, and all they produced was the seed of Jesus Christ.
Well, things are speeding up here. They are not going to be made perfect, brethren. If some minister has let you down, if you found out that they are in adultery, or they are taking your tithes and running away with it, or whatever you find out that they are doing, and you let yourself fall away from Christ because of their imperfection, I am going to tell you, you are a fool, and that is a Scriptural word.
Anyone that gives up on the perfection of God because of the imperfection of men is a fool. There is one purpose with this existing five-fold ministry, and that is to bring forth the true ministry of Christ that will minister to you in the perfection of His spirit, and they are coming forth today.
When Israel existed, and their purpose was to bring forth the seed which was Jesus Christ, there were many blessings for natural Israel, the whole nation was blessed, but they all died, they all died. As soon as the seed came forth, that was the end of them as a nation. Well, we see them resurrected today, but I am not going to get into that right now.
We see a whole church world of people being blessed. God answers your prayers, He loves you. You look to Him in faith, and He is going to meet your every need. You know, there are a lot of people with financial problems in Nigeria today, and a lot of them write to me, and I tell all of them, I write back to them, "I am not your Savior, America is not your Savior. Jesus is your Savior, and He is able to deliver you no matter how bad your economy is, He is able." Do not look to man and do not fall when I write to you and tell you I cannot help you. Jesus is your help.
We see the Lord blessing the church today despite the fact that His whole purpose for pouring out His spirit upon Christianity today is to raise up the first fruits, and once the first fruits company stands up in full stature, you will see the going, the waning away, of whatever anointing is left in the existing church.
They probably will still stand. We have a lot of dead churches today. The building stands, the people go there every Sunday, they sit there, and they cross themselves, and they repeat after some person, and they go home. There is no life in the church. There will probably be Pentecostal store buildings still standing. There will probably be preachers in the pulpit and people in the pews, but the Spirit of God will have left, in the same way that He left all the preceding denominations. You have to obtain an ability to follow the cloud, or you will be left behind. Do not count on your pastor. You can go to him for counsel, for help, for teaching, but your relationship with Christ is what will bring you through. What will you do if your pastor falls?
I want to tell you when God was raising me up, He raised me up in a powerful church, five years of glory, and one day I had a vision that my pastor was in a car, and he was riding up a mountain, and the mountain path was going round and round the mountain, and all of a sudden the car got out of control, and it started going back down the mountain, and that vision stayed with me for days, and guess what happened? This great man of God fell with a big crash, and I want to tell you a lot of people fell with him, but I did not fall, and you do not have to fall.
Do not put your faith in me, put your faith in Jesus. There is nothing that can destroy you. The economy in this country cannot destroy you, the diseases in this country cannot destroy you, the military regime cannot destroy you. Cleave unto Jesus.
To answer your question, that is what that means, and that is why you do not see the whole world converted, and as we were talking about riding over in the car this morning, we see the power of God falling into a nation or into a geographical location, and there is revival, and churches are raised up, and there are many conversions, and then you come back ten years later, and the buildings are still there, and the pastors are still there, and the people are still there once a week on Sunday crossing themselves, and there is no move of the spirit. What does that mean?
Brethren, this is a hard word, but I am telling you the truth. The power of God is moving all over the world, and when that move comes in, the person that is called to the first fruits company is not one of those people sitting in that pew crossing themselves when the spirit moves out.
He is coming in like a wave, and He is touching a lot of people, and everybody that He touches is not called to the first fruits company. Now if you are not called to the first fruits company, and you happen to hear what I am saying, or you happen to hear someone else, or you happen to get a revelation, you have the option of crying out, "Lord how about me?" My Bible says, "Treat the stranger in your camp as well as the one that is born into it." It is no harm to these people, God blesses it. God is not a little baby, our God is the Lord of hosts.
We have to start seeing Him as He is. To Him, this creation is His wife who has fallen into a pit. We are trapped down here underneath the earth in this terrible place called hell, and it is not His ultimate goal to bless us in hell. He is comforting us while we are down here, He is lowering canteens with water, and packages of food, but He wants us to come up out of the pit, and He is going to do whatever He has to do to do it, and if He calls and you do not come, He is going to go to somebody else.
I am telling you the truth, I am not trying to scare you. The message in the church has been weak. You have to hear the truth. Would you rather hear this truth so that you can cry out to God and ask Him to take you than to never hear it, and think that you are safe and not do anything, not seek God in the way you should be seeking Him?
Fear is never of God. If you are afraid of anything, I say if anything makes you afraid, it is not of God. Rebuke it. The hour is at hand. You know it has to happen sooner or later, it has to happen, it is going to be in our lifetime, and the message is going forth. This is the message, this is the trumpet that is ushering the spiritual work that will raise us up from the dead.
Now I am not saying it is the last word. I know when we got the Sonship message we thought it was the last word, and then some of us heard ultimate reconciliation, and we thought it was the last word. I am not saying this is the last word, but I know it is God's word of the hour, and I know that if you are looking for the power of God, the power of God is in His word of the hour. Now should the day come that He brings forth another layer of truth, this powerful word that you are hearing today is not going to have any power, but right now it is here, and He has brought it to you. That is a reason to rejoice, amen?
Amen, and I will tell you something else. The church is so backslidden in the United States, there are people laying bets, Christians laying bets out there, the revival is going to be in Africa. Well maybe it is, I do not know. We are backslidden in the United States, I will tell you, bad. Praise God we are living in exciting times, very exciting times, anybody else?
COMMENT: Praise the Lord. When we talk about resurrection, one of the first questions that people ask is related to what you have been talking about, perfection. The question is, those people who have gone, were they perfect? When people of God die, are they made perfect automatically at that point of death? If not, does the work of perfection continue in them in the spirit?
PASTOR VITALE: I am glad you asked that question. Those of us that preach the Kingdom message, we are very proud that we have content to deliver to you that we do not have to waste all of our energy preaching against someone else's doctrine, but I want to tell you that God has sent me out with a message contradicting this message. I am breaking the rules of the Kingdom priesthood. It is a false message.
Beware, it is circulating in the Kingdom church. It is intimately associated with the teaching of ultimate reconciliation, and it is rapidly, rapidly increasing.
What we have now in several areas, I have seen it in print, this is not just a theory, these dead saints which have supposedly been made perfect are appearing to their relatives, and they are teaching them. Well, does that not make sense? There must be more information on the other side of the veil. I hope you know I am kidding.
You see, you know about demons in Nigeria. We have a lot of people in the United States that are very naive when it comes to demons.
See, we have a group within the church that acknowledges demons and curses and things like that, and we have a large element in the church in the United States that totally deny curses and demons. Now people who have experienced witchcraft or have had relatives who have experienced it first hand, I do not have to convince you that demons are real. You have an advantage.
I got a newsletter from one woman who wrote, and I bless the woman. I have nothing against these people, I have been accused of cutting up other people's ministries. I do not cut up anybody's ministry, but I am going to tell you the truth, I do not care what they say about me. I am not against anybody, but I am going to tell you the truth. I got a newsletter from this woman that is so wrapped up in this...she has ministry somewhere out west in the United States, with her dead son appearing to her bringing the word from the other side, because there is much more teaching, The teaching on the other side is much better, and with all these angels, she has all these angels appearing to her.
You know how they let her know that they are around, angels, how they give her this information? They come to her in the middle of night when she is sleeping, and they turn the vacuum cleaner on and off.
Now you are laughing, but there are people in the church in the United States that do not know that angels do not do that, that demons do that, and it is growing, and they are saying after you die, you go on to perfection, and there is ministry on the other side of the veil, and there are classrooms, and there is teaching, and they are much closer to Jesus than we are, so they are sending evangelists over to this side and, of course, the evangelists from the other side know more than we do, so pretty soon the people that fall prey to this wickedness will only be taking their teaching from the evangelists on the other side.
You can laugh, it is okay. It is not funny, but it is funny. They believe it. I got a book from a minister in California claiming his dead son is involved in this, and God told me to write to him and tell him the truth. You should see the letter I got back from him. He accused me of being jealous that I have not moved into this yet.
Brethren, first your spirit is raised from the dead, and when your spirit is raised from the dead, it will give life or it will quicken your mortal body which is your soul, and it will give preservation to your physical body. The soul that sins will die. If your physical body dies before your spirit has been raised from the dead and quickens your mortal soul, your mortal soul which, by the very nature of its name, it is mortal, means it can die, will die.
The resurrection of the dead, and the perfection of the body and of the soul, takes place in the flesh when the spirit is raised from the dead. If that spirit which raised Christ from the dead, dwells in you...now, the spirit that raised Christ from the dead, brethren, is not the Holy Spirit. Does the Scripture say the Holy Spirit?
It says the spirit that raised Christ from the dead. Who raised Christ from the dead? The Father raised Christ from the dead, the Spirit of Christ, the administration of the Father which is the Spirit of Christ. Now we have one spirit but many administrations thereof, brethren.
The Holy Spirit does not have the authority to raise you from the dead. The spirit that has the authority to raise you from the dead, to quicken your mortal body, and preserve your physical body, is the spirit that dwells in a resurrected Christ. The spirit that is in Christ when He is in full stature in your mind has the authority to give life to the soul. That is not the Holy Spirit.
There is no resurrection of the soul or a body that dies because it has corrupted because of sin. Let me just comment on that. When your soul receives life, the way God gives life to your soul is that He purges it of sin. You cannot be raised from the dead and keep your sins.
When the man, Jesus of Nazareth, died, when He gave up the ghost, and His physical body died, the reason the Father raised the whole man from the dead was that He looked down on Him, and He looked at the mind of that dead man, and He saw that there was no sin in Him. He found a righteous mind, and a soul that has been purified because of that righteous mind, and the Father raised the whole man from the dead.
If your body dies, brethren, and God does not raise you from the dead on the spot, you better believe that your soul was not purified, and if your soul is not purified, that means there is sin in it, and the soul that sinneth will die.
This is a wicked doctrine, brethren, this is the last days. I am so excited. Do you see the upside of this? I want to tell you the ultimate reconciliation camp is apostatizing, it is apostatizing so rapidly you could not keep up with it if you try to follow it.
The resurrection of the dead comes as a result of the judgment of your sin-filled soul. When Christ joins Himself with your human spirit, the sin in your mind must be judged. There is no resurrection without the judgment.
I read in an international newsletter just a couple of months ago and in big bold letters underscored, it reads, THERE IS NO JUDGMENT! We are in the last second of the last minute on the last day. Now look, I do not preach hell and damnation, I really do not. If this resurrection of the dead comes, and you do not get in, or someone that you love does not get in, and the door is closed, and they are locked out there wailing and gnashing their teeth, there is no Devil with a pitchfork coming after them.
Whoever you are that is in this category, you will probably live out the rest of your life and pass on. You will go the way of all flesh. You will raise your children, you may have great blessings in your life, but you will not receive eternal life.
Now listen to me, man is negative. The mind of man has everything backwards. He has this whole message of the Gospel backwards, he has the whole nature of God backwards, he has the whole motive and purpose of God backwards.
Now listen, God is not punishing you because you have rejected Him. God is giving you eternal life because you have received Him. You do not receive it, live out your life, peace be unto you. I do believe that it is God's intention to save this entire living soul. The living soul is a spiritual entity. As this salvation comes forth, there will some human beings who will not abide in this body, because of the season, but their spiritual life will be resurrected from the dead. Either their offspring or whatever.
This is just clay, it is just clay. The entire living soul, the creation of God, the spiritual life of the living soul, is being raised from the dead, and also the living soul itself which is clay, which is spiritual clay, is being raised from the dead, but the key is that God is marring it and reforming it. Why does He mar it and reform it?
Because there is sin in the midst of us, and because there is sin in the midst of us, our bodies and our souls die. God put us in a society, or set us up in such a way that we keep having babies to perpetuate the human race until such time as God's program is complete, and His Christ appears in full maturity in the living soul, and the bodies and souls that are being formed at that time will be the permanent body and soul of the spiritual man. The whole spiritual man is being saved.
This flesh is temporal, it is temporal, it is rotting. To God's mind our flesh...I do not care how healthy you are, to God's mind our flesh is rotting off of Him. He is the spiritual man, and He keeps gobbling it back on.
You have to understand that we are not as important as we would like to be, but also I want to encourage you that we do have a part of us that will go on. We just cannot see it.
I would like to give you one more example. The Lord has likened this creation to a tree. We know that Jesus is the Tree of Life, and that this creation is The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the spiritual tree which we are, which we have the knowledge of good and evil, has a root that goes down deep under the ground. It has a trunk, and it has branches which abide...as long as the root is alive, the trunk and the branches are alive, but the leaves, brethren, only abide for a season.
Each season, the tree, any tree, well, I do not know about the trees in the tropics, but in the United States, trees put out leaves for a season, and then they fall off, and they rot on the ground. We rake them up and throw them away. My Bible says there are some men that are going to be gathered together like sticks and burnt in the fire.
Brethren, there is an aspect of this creation which is disposable and which never rises again. The root of it is being saved, the trunk, the branches are being saved, but the leaves that fall off will never rise again, but that root has the spiritual authority to put forth new branches, and when The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is saved through union with The Tree of Life, there will be leaves that come out which will not rot.
That is in the Psalms and the Book of Revelation, "that leaf will not wither, but shall be a healing unto the nations."
No matter how many generations of leaves that have fallen off of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the tree is being raised from the dead, but the leaves that fell off, the human bodies and the soul that we have known and loved, will not rise again. There will be a final crop of leaves that will appear on the tree which has abided through this whole experience, and that final crop of leaves will be the permanent leaves of the tree. It is just clay brethren, it is just clay.
We are all having an identity crisis here. It is just clay, it is not us, it is not us. God is not murdering people because they are not doing what He asked them to do. God does not have to do that, you know. He can make you do anything He wants you to do. He does not have to kill you. The key is, He is not working with everybody in this hour. He is working with the first fruits, and the people that surround the first fruits are getting blessed, but when the right time comes, this salvation will extend to every human being on the face of the earth.
In that day, every man on the face of earth...in what day? The day that Christ does appear in full stature in His people, every human being on the face of the earth will either find Christ fully born in them and be preserved, or they will live out their life, kiss their children goodbye, and pass on, just as men have been doing for centuries. Eventually, we will have a company of people on the earth who are all preserved.
When the earth comes to that condition, when every human being on the face of the earth is raised from the dead, the first resurrection is beheaded. They have a soul that has been beheaded, and their bodies preserved. The next step is the glorification, and when Christ has put down every enemy, even the last enemy which is death, He shall offer up the creation unto the Father. Glorification is going to be a one-time thing.
Now, the first stage of the resurrection is an individual at a time, the second stage of the resurrection is an individual at a time, the third stage of the resurrection, which is the glorification, everybody is going at once.
It is time for rejoicing. Any tears that are shed for relatives who have died or relatives or loved ones who are not interested in Christ at this time, you are spinning your wheels. I am sorry if I sound hard, but I am not here to baby you. You are spinning your wheels, you are wasting your time, you are wasting your time. Just put your energy into seeking God as to what He would have you to do, to permit you...to convince Him to let you be a part of this.
Now, do not misunderstand what I just said. You do not have to beg God, just submit yourself, ask Him what your part is, ask Him what He has for you, ask Him for His best in your life.
He wants willing people. He has called a multitude of people that are running away from Him. Do not anguish over your loved ones, and God has blessings for your loved ones. If you have loved ones that are not interested in God, I cannot promise you, you know, but I have seen Him heal unsaved relatives, I have seen Him deliver unsaved relatives from great destruction, because someone that is praying for them is beloved of Him.
There are blessings for everybody, it is glorious. If there is a sadness in your heart, take it before the Lord. It is your carnal mind.
You know, the Scripture says in Revelation 17, it says, " the merchants looked at that great city, Babylon, and she was burning, and the smoke was going up, and they backed off from her because they were so terrified of her destruction." The carnal minds of men, when they see carnality being destroyed, experience fear. You have to know that it is not you, that it is that squatter that is inside of you, because from the moment Christ is conceived in you, from the moment the spirit of God hooks up with your human spirit, and that three-fold cord begins to grow, you are no longer soul, and you are no longer your carnal mind, but you are Christ in an immature stage of development, and you must resist every thought and every emotion that is being whispered to you by Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind.
Sorrow unto repentance, but anything beyond that is waste of your...not only is it a waste of your time and your energy, but it is a stirring up of your emotions, and emotions are the exact opposite of the rational mind of Christ.
I am just going to say one more thing, and I think I am going to have to stop. I am getting tired. The warfare that is going on, the warfare of Armageddon is the battle of the two minds, the two minds in you and the mind of...now Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, is not going to send a carnal mind in somebody else to you if you are manifesting your carnal mind. As soon as you take a measure of victory over your own carnal mind, you better believe your best friend is going to wind up right on your doorstep saying, "Do you not think you should have done it the other way?"
First, the battle is in your mind, between your carnal mind and Christ, and then when you take a measure of victory, you will find other people's carnal minds...nobody knows what they are doing, do not be getting mad at anybody. If you take the victory in Christ.. they do not know what they are doing.
You cleave unto Christ, you cleave unto righteousness, and you know the people who are manifesting Christ, who have the wisdom of Christ, and the counsel of Christ, you know who to go to. Do not listen to the other ones. They are a snare unto you. I am not telling you not to love them, or not be friends with them, but do not take their counsel.
The battle is in your mind, and the two minds cannot be manifesting at once. Only one mind could be manifesting at any given second. At any given second, there is a thought in your mind. It has to be either Christ or the carnal mind. It has to be one or the other, and there is a constant warfare for one mind to tread the other mind underfoot, and they flip flop from second to second. Your thought can be carnal, or your thought can be Christ, and if you are not waging war against your carnal mind, it is your mind manifesting.
You default to your carnal mind. The warfare is in your mind. I just wanted to make that last point that only one mind could be manifesting at any given moment, and you better believe that as you start to enter into this warfare, I do not know where you are in your walk, but if you are hearing this for the first time, and you walk out of here and start entering into this warfare, you are going to be amazed at the thoughts that are going to crop up in your mind, and you are going to be amazed at the people that used to be your strongest ally coming over giving bad advice.
You are going to be amazed that the man who gave you this excellent counsel yesterday, today is giving you counsel that will destroy you. Everything must be taken before God and tried.
No reason to get distressed about it, but God wants you to be aware so that you can bring every thought into captivity. Every thought in your mind must be laid hold of and looked at, because the enemy is within. He is in our own mind. There is nothing your brother could do to destroy your spiritual life. Only your own mind could destroy you.
Stop looking on the outside, start looking on the inside, and get ready for glorious things. God has brought this message to you. The battle will be fierce, but if you fight, you must win. The ones that will be overcome are those who refuse to fight. Praise God. I really am suffering from jet lag, and I am going to be preaching tonight. God bless you.
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