A Powerful Side of Eternal Life Part 2 How Important Can Eternal Life be to Us Individually?: full transcript and answers

▶ 0:00 So we see here the result is receiving the Holy Spirit in us, not just with us but in us. Now that brings us to Acts 1:8: “You shall receive what? Power, after the Holy Spirit shall come upon you.” What’s the result when you come into an intimate, personal encounter with the Holy Spirit here? Power. Power to roll on the floor? No. Power to dance like a chicken, all these things that I saw back there as a young Christian? No. Power to what? Be a witness, be evidence, be proof, both in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the world. Hallelujah. And Peter, when he stood up and preached that simple message about Jesus and 4,000 were added to the church, he was

▶ 1:09 experiencing the power to witness and the result. Amen. And he didn’t roll on the floor, he didn’t do a jitter, big jiggle, he simply stood up and preached the word, and the word worked. A witness from the power of the Holy Spirit. That was good if you can handle it all. Right. Now, eternal life is, I’m going to make this statement now from the evidence that I gave you: eternal life is a personal, intimate, resulting encounter, resulting meeting with God and Jesus Christ. All right. Jesus said, “If you love Me, you’ll keep My commandments, and Me and My Father will come and make our abode in you.” How many want the whole package? Yeah, we want it all.

▶ 2:12 Hallelujah. Now, Hebrews 8:11, this is the new covenant: “None shall teach his neighbor and his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest.” All shall have a personal, intimate, resulting encounter with Jesus Christ. That’s in the covenant. Not just the Pentecostals, not just the Baptist, everyone that believes and comes can have this personal knowing of Jesus Christ. Amen. Not limited, it’s in the covenant. And if you feel wimpy, they got the word “least” in there. If you feel like you’re a mighty man of God already, they got the “greatest” in there. You still need it. Amen.

▶ 3:16 2 Corinthians 5:16: “Though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet we know Him thus no longer.” Okay. We heard the story: Jesus came and He was born of a virgin, and He, you know, lived with His parents, and, you know, He went to the temple and dazzled the scribes and the priests there in the temple with His knowledge of the Scriptures, and then He went back and He became a carpenter, and then, you know, He got baptized, and got baptized in the Holy Ghost, and preached and did miracles and all that, and died on the cross and rose. We know that part of Jesus. Amen. But what Paul said, “For this reason, I’m sorry, yet now we know Him that way no longer.” Why? Because He’s not in the flesh anymore. He has risen. He is in His throne in heaven. He poured out Himself back in the church on the day of Pentecost. He is with us now in Spirit. We don’t know Him just in the flesh. We know Him what? As Christ in us, the hope of glory, the Spirit of Christ. Can I hear an amen? And we know Him. “For this reason, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; old things have passed away, and all things become new.” See, this is the difference between being born again and just a believer. And the Congregationalists were right: the Bible plainly tells us there is power in the birthing in our new spiritual life. And eternal life is that encounter with Jesus Christ. Isn’t that powerful? Hallelujah.

▶ 5:19 Philippians 3:10 says, “That I may know Jesus.” I count all things worthless, anything I gain in this world, Paul says I count it as dung. I wanted the knowledge of Christ, and I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection. You see, too many people stay at the blood and the death, but we have a resurrected Savior, and the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells where? In us. Folks, that’s what makes Christianity different. We have a living God that lives in us, guides us, directs us, empowers us. This is not a philosophy, it’s a reality. You can’t reduce Christianity down just to another philosophy. An encounter with a supernatural God is a very powerful thing.

▶ 6:28 John 5:20: “We know the Son of God has come and given us an understanding.” Now listen to this. This we know, that Jesus Christ has come, and this Jesus has given us an understanding. Now what is that understanding? That I’m saved by grace through faith? No. That we may know Him: personal, intimate, resulting encounter that changes my life. I’m a new creature. “We know Him who is true. He’s given us an understanding that we are in Him,” Jesus Christ. And look at this: “This is the true God and eternal life.” Now, I submit to you two questions. Is Jesus the true and only God according to this verse? People that say He is not are antichrist; they’re opposing who Christ is.

▶ 7:51 Now, I submit to you another thing. Did Jesus give us the mental understanding that we could know Him? Absolutely. Is it in His new covenant? Absolutely. And then He explains what knowing is. And I don’t know about you, but this is what changed my life. See, when I actually went up to the altar and repented of my sins, I had an encounter with God there. Literally, I felt the weight of sin just lift off my life. I didn’t even know I had it. When I got filled with the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the love and the power that came, and the force within me to go to the Word and learn the Word. You see, I experienced these things. I experienced salvation, I experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost, and I experienced the Word being revealed to me little by little, line upon line, precept upon precept, and it made the difference in the world in my life. And while others that got saved when I got saved, and in the area I got saved, departed and went their own way and backslid, I stayed consistent. Why? Because I experienced these things in my life.

▶ 9:34 And when troubles come, they didn’t trouble me. When temptation come, I didn’t have to give in to it. Are you there? I’m just trying to give you an illustration. Mr. Barnes, he’s been around ever since I’ve known him. Say it’s not just me, I know all kinds of people. They’re not famous, they don’t write books, but Christ was real to them. They know Him, and they stayed consistent with Him. Hallelujah. I mean, you know, you don’t have to be a preacher to know God and be a light to the world. That’s right. You don’t have to be a preacher for God to come to you and personally cause you to experience the things of God. Absolutely. They’re for all of us.

▶ 10:26 Now, in Job, this isn’t a new thing. In Job, I love this verse. I can still remember reading my Bible through for the first time, and this verse just woke me up. This message has been around. See, Job is back there when Abraham lived, long time ago. I know. Job 19:25: “That my Redeemer lives.” See, he used that word “I know.” I’ve had a personal, intimate, resulting encounter with my God. He said, “He shall stand at last on the earth.” Job had no Scripture telling him that Jesus Christ was going to come back to the earth after He came the first time. “He is, Jesus shall stand at the last day on the earth after my skin is destroyed.” After I die, “this I know, that in my flesh I will see God, whom I will see for myself.” He said, yes, my body is going to go to the grave, the worms are going to eat me, but I know my Redeemer is going to come in the last day, and in my flesh I will see Him. That’s eternal life. That’s exactly what Paul said, wasn’t it? And folks, with this kind of an encounter and experience, let me tell you, Christianity is just a motor. I mean, it’s a powerful engine within you driving you upward all the time. Amen.

▶ 12:31 Hallelujah. Luke 23:43: “Today shall you be with Me in paradise.” Okay, He turned to the thief on the cross, one of them, and said, “Today you’re going to be with Me in paradise.” Why is that important? Because if eternal life is knowing Him, then what is, you know, what’s the end result? The end result is I spend eternity with Jesus, while you that reject Him and don’t want to know Him will spend eternity away from Jesus, because we’re all born into eternity. But this is eternal life, that I may know Him, that I may spend eternity with Jesus Christ. Hallelujah. “To be absent in the body is to be present with the Lord.” That is eternal life. Did you get it?

▶ 13:40 Now let me talk about my opponents for a little bit. Okay, talking to homosexuals recently, their argument was that the Bible only opposes homosexuality six times, so therefore it’s not a big issue. I said, “Sir, how many times does the Bible oppose stealing?” Well, they don’t know, of course, and neither do you, because I’m in debates with them and I got to get answers. I’m fighting with them, I’m trying to free them. I said, “Eight times. Does that mean stealing is okay?” I said, “Let me ask you again, sir. How many times in the Bible is sex with children mentioned?” And they go, “Well, it says, you know, you’ve got to not offend the little kids, and not, but it doesn’t say, ‘Thou shalt not have sex with children.’” I said, “How many times does the Bible say that?” And of course they don’t know. I said, “Zero.” I said, “Are you telling me it’s okay to have sex with an 8-year-old kid, a four-year-old kid?” I said, “Your argument is stupid. If the Bible mentions it one time, it’s law.” Amen.

▶ 15:15 Exodus International is a group that started in Melodyland Church back in the ‘60s, ‘70s. They used reparative therapy, they called it, “pray the gay away,” to get homosexuals to stop being homosexual. Therapy is a mental, medical way of trying to get people to change behavior or physical deficiencies and so forth. All right. And I watched this psycho stuff coming into the church. All right, I watched churches go from the power of the Word to therapy. And Melodyland was the leader of it, one of the leaders. Big church, famous people come from all over to go there to their charismatic conferences and so forth. And I’ve been to a couple of them myself, not the conferences but meetings where special, like David Wilkerson came in. They were very powerful, but you can’t stay powerful if you build on the wrong foundation. So through therapy, even today, they’re trying to treat human behavior through mental treatment, trying to convince them, talk them out of it. And the other side’s the same thing. I saw a documentary, and other Christians are trying to tell homosexuals, this group, they brought these young people in and said, “Now look in the mirror.” They looked in the mirror. “Now who do you see?” “That’s me.” I said, “Now say, ‘I see a child of God.’” And they would say, “I see a child of God.” See, “Now you’re a child of God.” So we got therapy going on on both sides: it’s okay to be a homosexual, it’s not okay being a homosexual. Let me tell you, folks, therapy is not in the Bible. Are you there?

▶ 17:37 And it wasn’t in there when I was a young Christian, and I stood up to Melodyland back there as a young Christian. I challenged them because they challenged me. They said I was teaching a bad doctrine, so we got into a little corral once, and I won that corral. The people lied. I wasn’t teaching that at all. They said I was teaching Jesus wasn’t coming. I didn’t teach that. I just didn’t teach He was coming the way they were teaching, that’s all. Hallelujah. Now, Melodyland was a round church. It used to be the Melodyland Theater, and big singers and everything come there, and then they turned it into this charismatic center. And of course it failed. And the leaders of this Exodus International, two leaders, Gary Cooper, who died from AIDS, left the group. These were the ones that were changing homosexuals’ lives. They left the group with a man named Michael [unclear]. They both left their wives and they lived in a homosexual relationship, and Gary died of AIDS. And what’s the point here? Therapy doesn’t work. The power of knowing Christ does. If we don’t have power of the Word, power of the Spirit, power of Jesus, we have nothing more than the world does.

▶ 19:22 Now, the Bible never uses therapy to change people’s lives. The Bible uses repentance. The Bible says repent. The Bible says admit you’re wrong, confess that you’re wrong, that you have violated God’s Word. The Bible says use self-control. We’ve got to preach repentance. Repent means you turn from what you were doing, the way you were going. It’s your responsibility to turn and denounce that wrong and admit you were wrong and go to Christ and go to that Word, and He will build you up, because He can’t lie. You can’t replace that with therapy, you can’t replace that with psychology. That is the power of the gospel under salvation.

▶ 20:24 Amen. And we saw back there that believers were not free. And there’s a lot of homosexuals I know that believe in God and they believe they’re Christians, but they’re not free. Why? Because they don’t know Him. I can pray in tongues, I can pray in English, I can pray with fortitude, I can pray with theatrics, but until they decide to repent and admit they’re wrong and follow the Word and seek the Word and seek Jesus, they are going to stay a homosexual. The thief is going to stay a thief. The drug addict is going to stay a drug addict. Now, is that the gospel? Yeah. Nowhere in the Bible do you find them using therapy. They used the Word of God and it worked. Of course, people can reject it, but see, they want to reject it but they want acceptance in the rejection. They still want to go to heaven, but they want to reject repentance, they want to reject self-control, they want to keep doing what they’re doing, but they still want to go to heaven. So they want you to approve their belief as a justifiable way to get into heaven.

▶ 21:49 Now that was a good statement. And so in the Pentecostal circles, we get all hooped up in the Spirit and the presence and, you know, tongues and prophecy and all this, and we’re not preaching repentance and people aren’t getting delivered. And outside those circles they’re all hooped up in programs and, you know, theatrics of special programs and, you know, bring an elephant in and get the people to come in, and what are you going to do next Sunday? You got to bring a tiger in to get the people to come in. And what do you do next? Well, you got to have a skydiver come down and land in the parking lot. You know, that ain’t what the Bible people did. They preached the word and the Lord added to the church as He saw fit.

▶ 22:32 Melodyland was one of the first mega churches. It doesn’t even exist today, and I knew it wouldn’t exist. Crystal Cathedral doesn’t exist today, and I told the church when it was built it wouldn’t exist, because they’re not building on the right foundations. Yeah, it looks good because they got numbers, but in the end God’s going to bring it down. I can remember telling the church, the crowd is not God’s approval. Look in your Bible: the crowd left Him when He asked for commitment. They left Him. Did Jesus change His message? No. Jesus was after disciples. He was after people that He could know, have an intimate, personal encounter with, turn them into a new creature, change their life. That’s what Jesus was interested in, whether it was 12, 70, or 5,000. And if the crowd left, He kept the same message. When Paul, all of Asia rejected Paul, did Paul change his message? No, he didn’t. And yet people will flock to Saddleback Church because they got 30-some thousand. They’re about the sixth largest church in America, something like that. They’ll flock there because the crowd, they think in their mind, means success, and he’s preaching a very distorted gospel. See, we’re known by fruits. The lead church is known by its leadership, and the church. Are you with me?

▶ 24:40 Hallelujah. I submit to you today that this is eternal life: a personal, intimate, resulting encounter with God. That third leg of the three-legged stool. Have you ever really met the Master? Have you ever really had an encounter with God where you knew the power had come into you, had touched your life?