A Deeper Revelation of Jesus Christ: What Every Christian Truly Needs – Part 1

Now let me give you an opposite illustration. Of all the men who have lived in your lifetime and mine, no one could say there’s been a greater demonstration of power in his life than Billy Graham. I would like you to go back through everything Billy Graham has ever said and see how many mentions of the “power of God” you can find; they will be virtually nonexistent. I commend my brother Billy Graham for that, as I would commend brother Paul of Tarsus, who also did not talk about the power of God in his life until one day he was forced into a corner and made one short reference to it because they were going to “seed” on the power of God.

You have been in those meetings where it was said that miracles and healing…and we can’t prove the gospel unless we…and you saw the power of God in healing, and it was marvelous, and that leg grew. You saw it grow. It grew that far, didn’t it? You bought into that, and then one day you bought into prosperity, and then the guy who was preaching it to you went to jail. But boy, one of the most difficult tricks I ever heard of in my life of having a gospel preached that was the gospel of prosperity is finding that in the New Testament. That is tricky. That is really difficult…but on every page is the cross of Christ. I don’t know how it’s done…but let me get off of that.

Then there was prophecy. You remember that we have to have prophets, and we have to have the recovery of the gifts. The five-fold, or is it six or seven or four or three? How many? Five-fold recovery. That’s foolishness too, because I have counted at least 17 gifts in the New Testament; Ephesians mentions just five. We have to recover the gifts. So we bought into recovering the gifts. And for me, I will say that one day I bought into evangelism. We have to have evangelism. Souls are going to hell. And you know that is just taking a segment of the gospel, taking it over here, blowing it up, and making it a 20th-century thing that is totally irrelevant and has no connection with what was being reported in the first-century writings.

A sister asked me last night about evangelism. I believe I’m correct. The word does not appear in the New Testament. There are evangelists, and there’s the evangel, but I don’t think there is evangelism. I’m going to tell you something. There’s not supposed to be any evangelism outside of the body of Christ. We are not supposed to specialize in anything; we are supposed to be a whole body. The healers were local, and the evangelists were local. They didn’t have tents on the road; they were local to their own town or village. The healers were local. They were not special. They were ordinary people, not looked upon as special. They were just some of the brothers and the sisters in the fellowship. They didn’t start out with this thing; it just came to them.

I want to give you the definition of a healer. Would you like to hear the definition of a healer? A healer is a brother or sister in a local assembly who has prayed for someone to be healed; if that sick person is not healed, the healer continues to care for and seek to restore that person. Now show me that person, and I’ll show you the gift of healing in the local body of believers, because you’re not the kind who goes around doing this and, if that doesn’t work, heads out the next day for parts unknown. You’re stuck in the local assembly where your gift has its limits. You continue seeking to help this person regain his health or comfort him while he’s dying; that is a healer.

We heard about evangelism, and we heard about theology, and we heard about Bible school. We heard, and this is incredible, about knowing the Bible, specifically the New Testament, and we got into that. We got into doctrine, and we bought into that, and we memorized all those verses, and then one day we went to breakfast, and we heard about speaking in tongues. Here I’ve got to be careful because some of you people are just downright sensitive about this, because you still believe that is the center of all things and it has changed your life. I wrote somewhere in a book that you could stand on the corner of any main street in America, and you wouldn’t have a day go by without stopping everybody who walked past you, but what you would find was at least a half a dozen burned-out Pentecostals who had been through it all and were just the walking dead.

I’m not going to take away your experience, but now I’m going to stop and make a point: each of these people proclaimed to you an “it.” Each of these people proclaimed to you an “it”; is that not true? Each one of them proclaimed to you a miracle, a tongue, a sign, a wonder, a healing, empowerment, evangelism, prophecy. Would you like to help me now? You were waiting for me to cover the one you got into. Submission and authority, shepherding, whatever. Yes.

Let me take a minute with discipleship. I want you to go to your concordance and look up the word discipleship outside the gospels, in reference to those who followed the Lord Jesus Christ. The word stopped being used after that. It is another perfect picture of our independent thinking wholly and apart from the church of Jesus Christ. One man is going to disciple another man. You can’t run fast enough to disciple me, mister.

I would not let any typical Christian on this planet, on this day, breathing the same oxygen that I do on this planet, try to teach me all the stuff I have just presented to you, which he’s going to present to me, and tell me that’s going to make me a better Christian. Let me tell you something. There is enough Christian ignorance on this planet to drown it in ignorance. When I hear and see people discipling other people, then the words come to my mind, as I’m sure they do to you: “The blind leading the blind.”

What a distortion of the first century. There ain’t no such thing like that going on. But what about 2 Timothy 2:2? 2 Timothy 2:2 is a church planter writing to a church planter about church planters. That’s all it is talking about, and brothers and sisters, we need second Timothy 2:2. We need church planters raising up church planters raising up church planters who will preach to us and declare to us a revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ; first and foremost, to present Him.

Now, I’m never going to get anywhere with an “it”. I need a “Him”; what I needed the day I got saved. I needed a Him. Someone showed me a manuscript recently that was about to be made into a movie, and it was Christian. They asked my reaction to it, and I said, “You know, it has the same fallacy in it, according to my personal judgment, that all of us have. We feel that if we could just get the plan of salvation out, then more people would be saved. A lot of people just don’t understand it, and if we get it understood, then so many more people will get saved.” And I said, “The whole movie is about the plan of salvation, but salvation is not an “it”. Salvation is a “Him,” and nowhere in that whole motion picture was He lifted up. A plan that mentions Him as Savior is in there, but the plan predominates. I did not get saved by a plan of salvation; I had a head-on collision with Jesus Christ.

Now, I know many of you were “four-lawed.” I’ve heard this term. You got four-lawed, and you got saved miraculously, and I think that’s wonderful, but I’m going to tell you something. I don’t know anybody who got “four-lawed,” but more than anything else, they need a revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Otherwise, they will be turned into a soul winner, and I can promise you in 6 to 10 years they will be a walking Christian zombie. Burned out.