Life of Christ #3 – Jesus Bound the Strong Man | Understanding Christ’s Authority

We are studying the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re not studying it; we’re looking at it. We’re looking at it from the viewpoint of an indwelling Father. Now, we can’t do that constantly, but that is our main point. How did Jesus Christ relate to His Father who dwelled within Him? We’re using a book entitled The Life of Christ in Stereo, and we’re on page 52. We’re down at the bottom of the page where it says “another tour,” and He is accused of “demonry,” and that’s where we’re going to be tonight. We’re going right on up to the parables. We’re going to see the parables by the sea.

This passage of scripture seems to open so innocuously, but I am so arrested by the opening of this passage; you could never know. I wish I could—and I may do it—take a year to write on the simple subject introduced here, and I could preach on it till the cows come home. There’s a revolution in these opening words here. I’m going to talk a little bit about it to you and to all those wonderful people out there whom I’ve never met. In fact, I’m just going to put this away and talk.

The concept of a classroom is about 400 years old. In fact, a nice classroom of people sitting in it, looking out the windows over a nice, trimmed front, grassy yard, could not be more than 300–350 years old. Yet in our minds, we think of virtually all Christian training in terms of a classroom. When we speak of education, we think of a building, just as we do when we speak of a church; whereas throughout human history—until recently, until modern times—education has been almost exclusively the domain of the home. I don’t mean education like “do this and don’t do this.” I mean reading, writing, and arithmetic. If anybody learned it at all, they learned it at home.

Public education is a revolutionary new idea. Now, if someone tells you they had it back during the days of the Greeks and the Romans, tell them that’s a bunch of hogwash. It was during the days of the Greeks and the Romans, among the very, very rich, but for the great masses of people, who always get left out of history, it did not exist except in a home. There is no education. I challenge you to disprove me.

There is no education going on the face of this earth today like unto the methods and the methodology used by the Lord Jesus Christ in the raising up of the twelve, nor has there been for the last seventeen hundred years. If we start that ancient dialogue on what’s wrong with the church, we ought to start right there: that the Lord was not messing around, nor wasting His time, nor being capricious, nor randomly selective, when He chose the way He raised up the twelve; it was God’s philosophy of education.

Furthermore, I don’t want to get into foundation stones—but it did not begin in Galilee; it began in the Godhead, and we see it in this opening passage of scripture. If there is anything under heaven that must be restored, it must be the proper way of the raising up of workers, and it does not exist and cannot exist as long as we have a classroom mentality. I put the classroom, the pulpit, the pew, the stained-glass window, the choir, the Sunday school, the seminary, the Bible school—and I come back and relist professors who teach theology and theology—and again the classroom, all of this together, as this almost impenetrable and cannot be labeled problem we have, that we as Christians today, we accept all of these without question, use them every day, and fall into them without one thought ever crossing our minds to say, “I wonder.”

We accept them, and furthermore, in our mentality, we can justify them, and we even find a scripture somewhere to back them up. And as long as our mentality operates on this level, there can be no revolution in the church. Nothing we ever preach about or do or lead God’s people to do is ever going to amount to a hill of beans, because these are obstacles far, far greater than most men and women realize to a true experience—true Christian experience—of the gospel, the true experience of the Christian faith.

A classroom stands there and confesses to you that it is there for the purpose of aiming straight at your brain, at the highest aspects of your mental faculties. This is done without question. And yet, the Lord Jesus Christ never aimed at our highest mental faculties. He aimed at our spirits. He was the most pragmatic teacher who ever lived. Only in my lifetime have we come to use the term “on-the-job training.” Before that, the closest term was “apprenticeship.” But the Lord was an on-the-job “training-ist,” and He was far more than this.

The Lord taught toward the spirit, not toward the mind, and He didn’t teach at all. He, in fact, was a revelationist, not a mentalist. He was not a “frontal-lobist.” He was a spirit-ist. I did not say spiritualist; a spirit-ist. He aimed at the spirit, not at the frontal lobe. He aimed toward revelation within those people, not toward a mental comprehension of His teachings. In the seminaries and the Bible schools, there’s no difference between them and a secular classroom, except the subject is different. It’s all aimed at the head. It comes out of the professor’s notebook into the student’s. I am fascinated, and I will remain fascinated as long as I live.

I walked into one of the finest, if not the finest, seminaries in the world at the age of 18. I was Gene Edwards. I stayed on top of that hill, Seminary Hill, for four and one-half years, and I learned information. Don’t tell me that I was rare in that experience. That’s what all 2,500 of us had: mental information given to our heads, put in our notebooks, our minds and our lips. I came out four and a half years later. I was no longer Gene Edwards. I was Reverend Gene Edwards, and the message was good and clear, if it was never spoken, and that was: if enough mental knowledge was put in my head, I was a reverend; I was a minister.

Nothing had happened in my spirit. I had gotten saved, but the growth of my spirit was never addressed. I remember we had a one-week revival every year, and one month each year the gentleman who came spoke on Prayer. I can tell you exactly where he got every message. It was out of R. A. Torrey’s book How to Pray. He restated every one of those messages that Torrey brought, and that was our experience of spiritual things. That is as far removed as the east is from the west from what the Lord Jesus Christ did. He was not only experiencing the Father in His spirit, but also showing those people His experience of His Father in His spirit, and they were seeing it, and they were being moved by it. They were participating in a peripatetic ministry. It was virtually the last peripatetic ministry the world’s ever known.