I couldn't go to the next scripture until I had experienced something from the breath of God
that related to what I just read.
And so, the Bible ceased being a book to read and it became the finger of God
that I'm fellowshipping with God Himself and He's tutoring me in what He's already written.
But now He's writing it on me.
God promises in Joel 2, 28 to pour out His Spirit on all humanity.
Welcome to Global Outpouring.
Will we contend for that promise outpouring?
Will we equip for that outpouring so that we may engage in that very outpouring?
I'm Philip Buss.
And I'm Sharon Buss. Welcome to the podcast today.
We have with us today our dear friend, Timothy Bentz.
He is an amazing man of God that kind of is under the radar for most folks.
Most folks don't know who he is, but he is one of God's very, very special, special servants.
And he's going to share with us today about his journey in the Word of God, studying the Word in the Spirit.
And this is part one.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We're so delighted that you're with us.
It's a real blessing every time we can get together and that we can share the things that God has given to us to share.
And we're so happy that you're there listening and that you're being blessed by it.
So if you are really being blessed by it, we'd love to hear back from you.
There's a place on our website, globaloutpouring.net, where you can give us some feedback or you can give us feedback in an email.
Feedback at globaloutpouring.org.
And please make sure that you're on our mailing list.
There's a teal button there on that website where you can subscribe to our email lists and there's different lists to choose from.
You can see what they are. And just let's build a relationship.
And by the way, one of the best ways to build a relationship is to come to our convention 2025,
May 21st through 24th in St. Louis at the St. Louis Airport Marriott Hotel, right across from the airport, right immediately off of the interstate.
It's so easy to get to. You can't miss it.
And plan to come and bring your family. It's family camp.
We have something for every age group and your life will be changed and your family's lives will be changed.
And you'll get a chance to build relationships.
You'll probably say, hey, this is my tribe.
This is where I belong and have an opportunity to grow in relationships that are going to go on for eternity
because God is wanting to build his people together into one body.
And every part is important. And you, listener, you are important on this planet.
And getting with other people that are of like mind, that are like precious faith is going to be encouraging to you to help you to grow and to help you to feel like you're not alone.
You're not rejected. You are wanted.
And so this is an opportunity for you to connect and to move forward.
So, Timothy, it's just such a pleasure to have you with us.
You're kind of like a stealth bomber, so to speak, that you go in and you do what God shows you to do.
And I just so appreciate what you do and how you just obey the Lord.
You know, just walking these things out and doing obeying God and letting him control my steps and plan my way.
And then when it gets into like an actual meeting, sometimes where it's had a time thing like that,
where I don't have an easy off that because I get into the spiritual realm and it's like being in the heavenly realms.
Sometimes I just can't, you don't want to stop, you know.
Well, you're outside of time when you're in eternity.
Yeah. And I'm very unaware sometimes of if it's too much for the crowd.
Occasionally it is. It's not always the time.
But sometimes people can only process so much information, even if it's spiritual.
And we have a scripture where Paul said, there's much more I'd like to say to you, but you're not able to contain it.
I've found that space a few times with crowds.
And I do have that reputation of I spoke, I do when people say, oh, he speaks too long.
I'm like, well, I have a one word sermon. It's my favorite sermon.
I remember when Paul was speaking in the upper balcony, someone fell down and they fell asleep.
Yeah, fell asleep. Crash.
I've had one fall asleep before. I've not had anybody fall out of window yet, but I anticipate that at some point.
It was four hours for us. No, five hours. It was five hours.
Yeah. And we were on the edge of our seats. And like you said, before we pushed the record button, it was like a time warp.
Yeah.
You don't have a sense of the passing of time when you're so engaged in what the Holy Spirit is doing and it's it's life changing.
And usually, especially with what happened with you guys, I generally have some sense of something God wants to say to you.
But I don't necessarily have I have it all planned out, scripted out or notes.
I might have a few scriptures, but I don't have a prolific amount of notes.
And it just comes out of my heart. And so I wouldn't trade places with anybody.
I've had an extraordinary life. And so I can draw on a lot of things that God has done with me or showed me.
And I feel like sometimes that's so rich, but I lived it out and I don't realize how, you know, it's like a normal thing to me.
I don't realize how amazing it would be to somebody else.
And so, yeah, but the idea of sharing your testimony when we when we tell people what God's done with us or for us, the word testimony means do it again.
And it's like he really wants to.
So sometimes I get this sense that, wow, he's really wanting to move massively in this territory or with this group of people.
And you just want to load up. I just want to fill their cup and make them overflow.
But beautiful, beautiful.
So the scripture that was coming to me as we were anticipating this interview, it was from Psalm 107.
And it's mentioned four times in the Psalm.
Oh, that men would praise the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works to the children of men.
And every time we've heard you like before we ever invited you, of course, I listened to some things that you had out there on Facebook and YouTube.
And that's another whole story.
If you want to go back, I'll put a link in the show notes for the folks that don't remember our brother, Timothy Bents.
There'll be a link in the show notes to the first time we interviewed him.
And we'll also put the playlist from the time that he was with us a couple of years ago.
We called it Fire on the Mountain and that's when in his last time, the last session, he spoke for five hours.
And if you don't have time to listen to five hours in a row, take it in however many minutes you can and just pause and come back later and listen some more.
Because it's so building to your faith to hear about how someone can walk in the spirit.
Every story that I've heard this man tell has in it the notes of hearing the voice of the father and obeying, hearing the Holy Spirit and obeying.
Just do what the Lord says to do, whether you understand it or not.
You just do what the Lord says to do and he's going to do wonderful works.
Yeah.
Amen.
And so I just want to open it up to you, Timothy, to share with us anything that the Lord puts on your heart that fits.
I mean, this is the category of wonderful works for the children of men.
What things have you seen God do in his wonderful works that has come as a result of you simply walking in the spirit?
Because you've been walking in the spirit since you were a little bitty kid.
And that story is on the previous podcast, so I won't bother going back and having you tell that.
I'm probably guilty sometimes of taking for granted the goodness of God that found me when I was a little boy and said, come and follow me.
And at that time, I didn't have anything else better to do, so it sounded like a good idea.
But along the way, again, I say this often, I've met people from all over the world, some presidents, some kings, some very well-known wealthy people, poor and homeless, every walks of life, almost every culture in the world.
And yet I wouldn't trade places with anybody.
And it's not because I think I'm all that, it's because God has just been so good and gracious to me.
Yeah.
But the other side of that, don't flip that coin over and say, also, I have a pretty normal life.
I don't really seem like I'm, you know, a lot of what God has done is almost hidden.
It's been one of my best friends back in the mid-80s called me a stealth bomber.
And I remember looking at him and say, what is that?
You know, because it was still classified back then.
And I was like, I don't know what a stealth bomber is.
And he's sort of like, oh, I shouldn't have said that because he did know.
And so he described it prophetically without trying to reveal something classified.
He said, well, it's just kind of like, you know, it can fly in, it's so fast and so accurate that by the time it blows something up, it's 700 miles away.
Wow.
And you don't even know it was there, you know.
And so he said, it's completely under the radar.
And yes.
And that description, I said, you know, that does kind of describe the way God uses me a lot.
And at that time, that frustrated me.
I wanted to be, you know, why can't I be a little bit more known?
Why can't I publish a book?
Why can't I do some things?
Yeah.
That same in 1990, I went to an apostolic prayer conference, which that was just the beginning of a lot of the apostles.
Kind of emerging and major networks, you know, coming out.
And I think they've always been there, but this was sort of the body of Christ in America was trying to embrace that apostolic gift a little more.
And so I was just thrilled to go there.
There's supposed to be 3000 people at this meeting.
And I show up and the people that were organizing says, where's your stuff?
And I was like, what do you mean?
They go, well, we got a whole book table for you.
Where's your books?
I'm like, well, I don't have any.
And actually, that's not true.
I said, I've got 18.
I just haven't been able to publish them, but I didn't bring any.
And they were like, well, what are you going to put on your table?
I was like, I don't know.
I guess I'll just sit there between the sessions and the people want something I'll pray for.
So that they could have me.
But it upsets some of the other ministries that were there because they just didn't know what they were.
How do you live?
How do you support yourself?
I mean, you know, you're obviously, you know, and I said, I don't really know how to explain it.
I just do whatever Jesus says and somehow it works.
Yes, that's a key.
That's a key.
One of the things I wanted to share that I think people know this in part,
but the experientially most people don't as learning to hear God was not an aptitude
that everybody has that you have to be enabled by the Holy Spirit to hear God.
And, you know, there's a few scriptures like here, oh, Israel, where God is telling them to hear.
There's a couple of scriptures where he's correcting them for not hearing.
And then there's also the one prerequisite that if you say you can see,
you're probably going to become blind.
And if you say you can hear, you're probably going to become deaf.
And I grappled with that when I was quite young, you know, about 15 years old.
And I was like, why is this written in the scriptures?
Like, how, why wouldn't you want us to see and hear?
How can we block ourselves from that?
And it relates more to pride than it does to the hearing ability that if,
if I get prideful in my ability to hear God, then I'll stop hearing.
And if I try to make it about me, instead of the Holy Spirit's
aneptable ability, enabling me to converse with God, then I'm going to take credit for my ability
to hear and I'm going to take credit for what I'm saying that God is saying,
instead of just being a part of it at fellowship, you know.
And I didn't know exactly what had fixed that in me.
And so I went to Jesus and said, do I have any of this?
Maybe there's things I'm not hearing that I should be.
Maybe there's things I'm not seeing that I could be.
Have I been guilty of this in any way?
And I said, I don't know how to even know that you're doing this wrong.
If you end up with that circumstance where I can't see and hear, if it's completely shut off,
then it would be easy to tell that I'm fumbling through life and never hearing anything from God.
But to the person that can hear and can see, and is prophetically inclined, for instance,
they don't know what it is that they're not seeing and not hearing.
And so we still, yeah, we still may be greatly limiting ourselves.
Sometimes where if your gifting is designed to bring that to the body of Christ,
he may not cut it off totally, but you may not be going deep enough.
Wow.
So the fact that the word of God is supposed to be understood as multi-dimensional,
I need to know the length, the breadth, the height, the width, the depth of it.
So maybe we've not gone deep enough.
And the answer I got was quite profound.
Of course, I was only 15, so I didn't know what to do with it.
I wasn't preaching every day at that time, although I was doing a lot of ministry.
And the Lord took me to Zechariah.
He said, I want you to look at Zechariah's life.
And this is a response to what your question is.
First thing he said to me very clearly, he said,
it's a good thing to periodically check in with me and say, how am I doing?
That's seeking me in a humble way.
It's a good idea.
Like you go to the doctor once in a while and say, give me a physical, how am I doing?
And he might find something you don't even know about.
So he said, if you come to me and you ask me how you're doing with an open question mark,
it's a very healthy spiritual thing to do.
But don't marvel if I correct you or don't be upset if I point something out
you didn't know was wrong.
But he said, I want you to know very few people give me the opportunity
to point out what's wrong in their life, unless it's already a mess.
And they're wanting help to fix it.
Wow.
So he said to go past the place where you've dealt with every known sin
and you've washed your heart and let me make it clean.
And now you submit it to me to go deeper is something I greatly desire from fellowship with men.
And I want people to let me take them as deep as they want to go.
Oh, yes.
And most people only ask me for help when they need help instead of take me where you want me to go.
That's it.
And something shifted in me at that time, I didn't have quite language for it,
but it moved into a place of deeper fellowship.
Instead of thinking about I'm called to do something in ministry.
Now it's like, I don't care if I minister, I just want Jesus.
I just want to fellowship with them.
Yeah, that's good.
And I think I moved into a place of friendship at that time, but I didn't know it
until he began to speak that.
And what happened to me over the next three years is I had a couple of dozen people
just come up to me and say, God told me that you were his friend.
I'd look at them kind of feeling like, well, what did I do to get that?
I didn't don't remember asking specifically for that.
Wow.
So I said, Abraham must have gotten that somehow.
I'm not sure if he knows how he got that either.
Some of the people in scripture that didn't always do everything very well,
probably had that with Jesus.
Peter would be a great example of that.
He's still denied Jesus, but he denied him out a great duress.
It was like the whole city was in upheaval.
So it would be hard not to have faced the stuff that he was at that moment
and done everything perfectly.
But Jesus never condemns him for it.
He just told him what was going to happen.
Yes, he did.
He didn't even tell him that, you know, basically it was like, fear not.
I've prayed that your faith will not fail.
Well, Jesus always gets his prayers answered.
So that's a win.
That's a win win.
That's a win win, even though you're going to mess up royally, God's already fixed it.
But he still had to go through the remorse of what he did, you know,
and the recovery process of coming back to a place of deep fellowship
and feeling like he was accepted.
And I find it fascinating when Jesus came out of the tomb
and the women see him for the first time,
especially his probably his mother and Mary Magdalene.
Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name.
He says to her, go tell my disciples that I'm alive and Peter.
And that little comma and Peter was a way to heal Peter's calamity.
Yeah.
Because I think at that moment, if Jesus had popped into the upper room,
if that's where everybody was hanging out,
Peter would have probably left the room or found a dark corner
because of his shame and his sense of remorse that he's disqualified himself
for everything that he thought he was creating.
He thought he was created for.
And yet Jesus, before he even sees him, says,
let Peter know that I called him by name.
And the Lord has often done me that same way where,
okay, you made a mistake, but I'm coming to get you.
I'm not going to let you slip out of my hands or go the wrong way.
And he doesn't promise us a way to be perfect.
He promises us a road to perfection.
Yeah, that's good. I like that.
So he sort of is very happy with us just being willing to make that journey.
And the more you can admit, well, I'm not really doing everything well or perfect.
And there's a lot of things I don't know.
And I fall short a lot of things.
And even though I've learned a lot of things, I still make a lot of serious mistakes.
And yet Jesus still shows up and takes me by the hand and says,
you're my friend, let's fix this.
And so I started looking at this idea of the length, the depth, the breadth, the height.
Like, what is that?
And reading the Bible as a book, I learned to read on the Bible.
I credit my mother for that.
My mother's goal when she was a young girl was to,
she used to voice this often to her friends when she was in her teens and twenties.
And she would say, you know, when I grow up,
I want to take a baby in one hand and Bible in the other and spend my life putting them together.
That was the statement she made.
A profound statement, she said that to many of her friends as she was growing up.
And that was her life going.
And her dad very wisely said to her, I found this out from him later,
but he told her very wisely, well, you better find a godly husband first.
And so, if you want to accomplish that goal, you're going to need a husband.
So she did.
She found that too.
And then, but she purposely did it with my brother and I.
She would put us on her lap and she would read the scriptures.
And both of us learned how to read on the Bible.
And it was the only book I can remember in my very young years.
Now, there was lots of other books.
We were both prolific readers.
My mom loved getting us other books too.
But the Bible stories were my favorite things.
And for her to teach us those, she didn't just read them to us,
but she taught us to read.
And then by the time I was a teenager though, I looked at the Bible
and I realized that I'm carrying it around all the time.
I'm reading it every day.
And there's a whole lot of it that just doesn't leap off the page to me.
And yet every once in a while something does.
It means a lot, but I asked God to take me deeper.
And to help me hear him better and to help me see more.
And I think for the first time, I don't know, I can't remember what led me to do this.
It wasn't like something seemed wrong.
It was more of just that scripture.
But I thought if there's the possibility that I've not seen something you wanted me to see,
or I've not heard something you wanted me to hear, I want to ask your forgiveness for that.
And I want you to open that up for me so I can go as deep as you're willing to take me.
And Lord's answer was very profound.
He says, I'm willing to be as profound and glorious and deep with you as you want.
You're asking me to give you all I want, but it's the opposite.
Like you have, as he said, at this given time in your life, you have as much of me as you want.
And if you want more, ask for more.
Yes.
So I said, well, I want to go deeper and further.
And I want to go into the unknown, you know.
I already was having encounters in the heavenly realms.
That was pretty profound.
I didn't talk about it very much when I was a child, but I would see things in scripture and go,
look, this is kind of like what I just experienced in the heavenly realms.
This guy, this guy went, this guy went through something too.
And, but the story was still a story on the surface of a book.
It was a written story and my brain was processing it that way.
That's not a bad thing.
It just limited.
So when I asked Lord to take me deeper, he said, if you want that, there's two things
you need to understand.
One is I've always spoken to you in English and I like, yeah, well, what's wrong with that?
He goes, I laugh when I say this, I'm sorry, but it's like, he said, well, I hate English.
You're the one.
I was, I remembered somebody telling me that story and I related it to somebody recently that,
that Jesus said something like that.
Okay.
You're the one.
It had never dawned on me that Jesus might not like English.
How can you not like English?
Yeah.
And he said, I hate English because even when you're hearing me at a hundred percent,
you're, you're only comprehending about one or two percent of what I'm actually saying to you.
Wow.
Because your language will not convey it into your spirit on the same depth that I'm,
that I'm speaking.
And he said, it's not a problem with your hearing.
It's a problem with your language.
It cannot interpret the profoundness of my words.
Wow.
Beautiful.
And then I started crying.
I couldn't stop crying because I just said, Jesus, I've heard your voice since I was two years old,
but you've always spoke to me in English and you must have just known that's the only way
I could understand you.
Why didn't you speak to me in your language and then give me a capacity to learn it?
So well, you didn't ask.
You have not cause you asked.
Yes.
It's like, but I wrote the word with my finger and I spoke the universe into existence with my word
and I wasn't speaking English.
And so the creative power of his word might be more attributable to his language than just
to the fact that he said it.
And I had never thought about that too much.
I didn't really, my father was a Baptist pastor and he was a Hebrew and Greek scholar
and he had tried to teach me some Hebrew and Greek and I didn't feel like I had an aptitude for it.
So one day I realized that, well, in the heavenly realm, sometimes I hear the angels speaking
and I don't know what they're saying and that must be what it is.
It's the language.
And so I looked back at that scripture.
If you say you can hear, you might become deaf.
If you say you can see, you might become blind.
And I realized that I probably am not seeing a vast amount of information that God wants me to see.
And I'm probably not hearing.
I mean, what Jesus just said, I'm only hearing about one or 2% of what he's saying.
Hmm.
And yet, to all of my friends at that time, I was the best in the bunch.
I was hearing better than anybody.
Yeah.
I would get profound details sometimes for the Lord.
So I think some of this has been a journey of just doing things over and over and over
the best you can, not being too worried if it's a little bit falling short.
You just, okay, I'll do that again.
If it doesn't come out right or you don't, you think you're going to be able to do it,
if it doesn't come out right or you don't, you think you don't hear God well, ask again.
So at that particular time, I was just starting to drive and I said to the Lord, I was like,
I want you to hit a reset button in me.
I would like to just have a, I didn't know exactly what computers all did at that time,
but I'd read bits and pieces on some research.
And I said, I want to, I didn't say this exact word.
It's what I meant at the time though.
But it's like, I want you to reformat my brain.
Yeah.
Just rewire me so that right now it seems like my soul and my mind, will and emotions are in charge
and I want my spirit in charge.
Amen.
And I want to be completely submitted to the Holy Spirit and to the will of God
and whatever you want is what I want.
So I said to Jesus for the first time, I remember, my heart probably said this a lot when I was
younger, but this was wording.
And I just leaned on his breast and I said, I give up my free will.
I know that you've promised me all the desires of my heart if I seek your kingdom first,
but I give up my right to choose what I want.
And I want to know you as a king and I want to have anything that you've created me for
and don't let me fall short of it.
And I said, please enable me to comprehend a greater depth than I have.
And the way he did that, he said two things you need.
One, I want you to go back to Genesis one and I want you to read the scripture.
It's completely different.
Okay.
I said, all right, how?
You know, because I had always was avidly reading the Bible every day.
I would try to read a whole book a day.
Sometimes I was out doing the Bible in a year, guys.
And I had friends that we were doing that together.
So I was always trying to stay at step ahead of some of my friends.
And the Lord said, you're doing too much.
You can't comprehend it as much.
So he said, I want you to just read one or two scriptures or a couple of verses.
A complete paragraph and no more.
And then I want you to seek me about what you just read and ask me to let you taste
and see that it's good.
I want you to ask me to let you see what you just read as well as hear what you just read.
And I want you to go into the spiritual realm with my help and I'll let you relive that scene.
And you'll be a participant in the moment that was spoken.
Beautiful.
And you're not allowed to go on to the next thought or next scripture or the next paragraph.
He said, I don't want you to rush through my word.
I want you to experience it and then you'll go to the next one.
And so that sounded fun.
I was sort of a visionary anyway, kind of a visual learner.
And I was very frustrated with school because they didn't know how to teach visual learners
at that time.
Jesus knew that about me.
He made me so he made me a visual learner and that he began to tutor me that way.
So just looking at Genesis now from Genesis one and two is the creation story.
I can say it took me three months to get through Genesis one and two that way.
Mostly just a verse a day.
And then I had to experience that verse as if I was there at first light.
And what was interesting is I had never heard this priest.
Sure it was, but not in the Baptist circles that I ran in.
But I didn't make it out of Genesis one before I voiced out of my heart, Jesus, it's as if
I'm here with you, like I'm witnessing you saying, let there be light.
And instead of saying that's good that you're seeing it, he said, it's good that you remember.
And I said, what does that mean?
He said, well, you were here when I created you.
I was here when I created light.
Beautiful.
I knew you before the foundations of the world.
Your spirit was communing with me.
You did witness this.
But when you became a baby and were born, you forgot.
Yeah.
And now your spirit's awakening.
You're remembering this is co-creating really.
You witnessed this already once.
Now you're getting to relive it again.
And it's like instead of it being something you're just now seeing, it's more like you're
remembering a memory that's stored in your spirit.
Wow.
Well, that was fascinating to think that God really has already given us all so much more
than what we have comprehended.
And the more that I understood that, the more I really began to go into that.
And it sort of accelerated, man, I'm embracing this.
This is really fun.
But I'm certainly, I felt like a little turtle going through the word like this is tedious
and slow.
But at the same time, it opened it up on such a vast level.
And then I realized that I couldn't go to the next scripture until I had experienced
something from the breath of God that related to what I just read.
And so the Bible ceased being a book to read.
And it became the finger of God that I'm fellowshipping with God himself.
And he's tutoring me in what he's already written.
Come on.
But now he's writing it on me, you know?
And it wasn't so much memorization.
I think I could have gone a little deeper and learned how to memorize a lot better,
which I had friends that did.
I'm still not very good at memorizing things the way some people can.
But I remember things when it gets, I say when it becomes a visual for me, it gets
branded on my spirit easier.
But the language was still an English translation.
Okay.
And so there were times when I would be in the visual side of this and go,
that's not exactly what it says, you know?
And it's not that it's wrong.
It's my comprehension was lower, you know?
Yeah.
And again, I don't think anybody probably did that on purpose, but the Bible actually
being in our hands is a miracle.
But at the same time, I realized that probably all of us for our entire lifetime, we have
not experienced as much of the living word as we could.
And the main takeaway that happened then, it's like halfway through that year, that
first year doing that, I stepped into this place where suddenly there was no distinction
of difference between Jesus himself and the written word.
The conversation, the communion, the fellowship with him was the same when I was reading as it
was when I was in the spiritual realm, experiencing something.
Wow.
And I attribute that to the foundation that my mother laid.
Yeah.
She imparted something to me because of her love for God's word.
But Jesus, I think, became extraordinarily real to me because of that foundation and
the blessing of my house and then my encounters with him.
So it went from being, I got to figure out what this word means or what this is really
saying to an encounter with the living Jesus. And so most of my stories, most of the things
that I've lived out, that's probably the reason why I've had a pretty extraordinary life because
I'm still doing that every day. And when he says something, and it's not necessarily a scripture,
but in the context of it never disagrees with scripture. But sometimes he'll say something
and I can't find the verse that matches up directly with it, but I know it's still in
context with something he has said. I've listened to that and I've walked that out
with the same reverence that I do for the written word. And yet sometimes that's really hard
because I've got to say this, this is a really important thing to remember for everybody out
there that is wanting to hear God better and wishes they had a greater gifting of that.
First of all, I want you to stop saying you don't. That's right. Yeah. They're limiting yourself.
Yeah. Yeah. You're actually cursing yourself when you say, I can't hear God. Yeah. You were created
to hear him. You weren't created to have a problem hearing him. You were created with the capacity
to commune with him deeply. And so Christ in me is my hope of glory. Yes. If you're not hearing him,
you're limiting something that he's doing that's activity going on within you. You're limiting it
in some way. And that can be a lot of reasons. Either you're not saying yes to it, or either you
saw it and didn't want to do it, or he told you to do something you decided you didn't want to.
The worst thing is to just not understand it and therefore not move.
Kind of, this is really difficult for people that are trained to be teachers because teachers
have a gift to deliver things line upon line, precept upon precept. And so they've got to
figure the whole thing out before they tell you. And it's part of their gifting. So when Jesus says
something to them, like, I need you to go to this spot tomorrow, they go, why, where, with who,
when, they got to figure all the details out. And he doesn't like to speak like that. Sometimes he
just wants you to take a move that direction and then he'll fill in the blanks as you're going.
Right. And I think if there is a secret to my journey, it's because I decided very early,
no matter what I heard, I would move on it as quickly and as obediently as I could,
even if I didn't understand it. Beautiful. And even if I was wrong in the way I interpreted it,
you take one or two steps, he'll tap you on the shoulder and speak again because he doesn't want
you to go the wrong way or to go foolishly. He wants you to walk with wisdom. But this is
a Western mindset where we're trained to figure it all out and be an expert before we graduate from
the class and God does not tutor that way. So in the disciples, he didn't reveal to them
everything that he was going to do, but he said, come and follow me. And one of the encounters I
had was, I'll share this, the detail when Jesus walks up to Capernaum for the first time,
or at least the first time that we know in scripture, and he's going to call a couple
of brothers to follow him. So he walks up to Peter and he says, Peter, I want you to follow me.
Now, he didn't have a revival tent. He wasn't wearing the robes of a rabbi. There was no
advertisement saying that the Messiah is coming to town. Nobody knows who he is in that territory,
except maybe John the Baptist and his family. And he's not standing there with him. So Peter's
seeing a stranger and this stranger says to him, come and follow me. And Peter seems like a pretty
practical guy. He's got responsibilities, he's got a family, he's got a boat, he's got a trade that he
does. To jump out of his boat and follow somebody that you don't know who he is or where you're
going is a really profound thing. And we read that in English and we don't see the miraculous
response. The fact that he said yes is absolutely off the chart, but it's miraculous.
Yes. He resonated. But Peter had a wife too, and he had a family. And he had a mother and a father
there and his brother. Now, his brother also gets the same word, so that probably made it a little
bit easier. But what I lived out, this is the way it worked out. I'm reading that and I'm in the
story and God's making the whole story, the whole scenery come alive. So I see him jumping out of
the boat and talking and Jesus is just a very, you want to come near him. You see him for the
first time, he just draws you because of his heart and his countenance has something holy about him.
He doesn't make you afraid. He wants to get close to him. So Peter, like, I got to know this guy.
I don't know what he's here for, but let's go talk to him. And when he says, I want you to follow me,
he just says yes, almost before he realizes what he's doing. But then he's got to explain it at
home and he's got a Jewish wife and a Jewish mother-in-law. And so at the next scene, I'm at
the table in his house and he's telling the family, we're going to go follow this guy. And he
says, well, who is he? Well, I don't really know. His name is Jesus. Well, where are you going?
Well, I have no idea. What are you going to do? I don't know. How are you going to live? I don't
know. What are you going to do with your boat? I don't know. You know, well, how are we going to eat?
Well, I don't know. You know, but somehow he finally just says at the table, look, I'm compelled to do
this by my spirit. I know it's the right thing to do. I know it's the right thing to do. I know it's
the right thing to do and somehow God will make things work. That's, I saw my own heart at that
moment. I went, wow, that Jesus, that's what I've done too. You know, it was just about as crazy.
Like, I don't know where we're headed or what we're going to do with my, my, I gave up planning out
my life and I'm headed on Jesus's plan, but I never really thought about the disciples being called
by someone of no, that Jesus had purposely made himself of nowhere. But he was, he was
of no reputation. And so there was nothing in the outer appearance or in the conversation other than
the power of the spirit that would have compelled any of them to say yes. Yet they did. And the world
is different because they obeyed that. But then, you know, Jesus is not stupid. He knows that this
is a, some practical questions that need to be answered. So he gives them a miraculous catch of
fish. He does a few miracles along the way. He makes it clear pretty shortly into the journey
that this is going to be good and that everything's going to be taken care of that you're concerned
about. He becomes concerned about his family too. And now it takes a few stories before you see that.
But as you, he comes back a couple of times. The next time he shows it, but Capernaum,
he goes to the synagogue and it's a pretty wild story, but in the story of the synagogue,
he heals a man with an unclean spirit. Now that is not supposed to be in the synagogue. And so
the first part of it just looks like he's doing a miracle. And that's why I always looked at it.
But when I'm in the scene and I'm reliving it, I see somebody at the door did not discern that this
man was unclean and the priest did not discern it and the man's family did not discern it.
And so there was a breakdown in Capernaum of an ability to discern what was holy and they all
touched that man, which means everyone was unclean. So when, when Jesus cast an unclean spirit out of
the inner sanctuary, he's actually saying to the entire crowd, you're all unclean. All of you have
touched this man. And that means the priests were disqualified, the Levites were disqualified to do
their job until they go through seven days of ritual cleansing. Then he goes right from there
to Peter's house. I've never seen anybody say this or preach this, but he goes to Peter's house and
Peter's mother-in-law is sick and he heals her. And when, when I'm in the scene and I'm seeing
that she, she looks at me, she could see me somehow. She looks at me and she goes, I've never
missed being at the synagogue, you know, like, like a little granny, like I've never, I've never
not gone to church. And I was so sick, I couldn't go today. So Jesus brought the Ecclesia to her.
Beautiful. And he literally brings the glory into her house because her heart was more
plain than the rest of the city. Wow. So she didn't get defiled. Right. Rather, it was better to be
sick than to get defiled by the unclean spirit of the place. Jesus wanted to be there in the room
with her more than he did in the synagogue. Wow. That's amazing. Then he tells her, I know you've
been feeling bad, you're feeling better now, I just healed you, but you're going to have to get up and
start cooking because the whole city's coming to the door. Yeah, the sun's gone down now. This is
the way to announce the move of God. Like, you know, the whole city did not come to the door of
the synagogue. The whole city came to the door of the holy mother-in-law. Wow. Who had knew how to
raise her family, knew how to praise for her family, that it was her prayers that had prepared
Peter and his brother's heart to follow Jesus. And even the fact that Peter's so extraordinary,
he's treating a mother-in-law the same way he would treat his own mother. And that says a lot
about the kind of character that he had in his own house. And all that just became so alive to me.
And I realized, well, wow, this Jesus basically knit a family together and became a part of the
family. Wow. They all fellowshiped with him on a level that he was just a part of the family from
then on. Yeah, sure. So now when they're out on the road with them for the next three and a half years,
he's not separate from their love for their household. He took care of the family. He fed
them. He took care of the business by giving them an extraordinary catch of fish. Yeah. He took care
of the health needs of the family by healing it before they started the journey. Yeah. Too far
into it. And then when he goes back from time to time, the lessons building on that. But every
scripture came alive to me on that level and something really unique always sort of jumped
off the page. And I was like, wow, I never had really looked at that healing from the mother-in-law's
perspective. Wow. I had a grandmother like that. It would have just wrecked her if she couldn't
have gone to church. Wow. And if she was sick, she still went to church. She expected to get
healed before the service was over. Wow. I think that was very much like Peter's. Now at the
crucifixion then it was totally different than what I thought because now Peter has lived it out and
it should be culminating a lots of good things happening. Instead, it looks like it, something
flips the switch and it turns into a disaster. And then he denies the Lord and makes the disaster
even worse. But that idea that go tell my disciples and Peter that I'm alive. The other thing I said,
Jesus, why did you pray for Peter's faith not to fail, but still let him go through that?
Yeah. And the Lord said to me about some, it's very profound. He said, I had already given him
the keys to the kingdom. So what he went through was a reflection of the whole nations. Wow.
And the way I restore a nation is I first restore a son. Oh, that's beautiful. Wow. That's so
profound. You don't know how important you are. Wow. Just little old me, just this little fisherman
guy. You just don't know how important you are in the spiritual realm where God takes something
ordinary and uses it extraordinary because your little acts of obedience might transform your
whole nation. The other thing that I had a question mark when I'm reading this, because I realized that
you didn't say this to all of the guys. You didn't tell all of them that you were giving them the
keys to the kingdom. You gave all of them the Holy spirit, but you didn't tell all of them that they
had the keys. And I wanted to know why. So I went back over that passage several times. Now in the
scene where Jesus says to Peter, you know, you're you're a little rock, but I'm a big rock upon this
rock. I'm going to build my church and Peter, I'm giving you the keys to the kingdom. He doesn't
explain it. He then walks away in the scene. What I witnessed is Jesus walks away a little ways to
pray. They could still see him, but he was off by himself. And all the boys are sitting around with
some of the women, including the mother of Jesus. And they all look at Peter and they say, what did
he give you? Peter said, well, he said the keys to the kingdom. Well, what is that? I don't know.
Wow. It was again, it was the same kind of thing like what I had witnessed in the heart. He's like,
I don't know. He didn't tell me what that what I could do with it. I mean, but where's the keys?
Let us see them. Well, he didn't actually give me a key, you know. And so he's like, he was just
completely baffled by I don't know what to do with this word. And everybody else wanted to know,
well, why didn't he give us a key? Yeah. I was like, well, I don't know. But isn't that comforting
to be able to just say, I don't know, and it's OK. Exactly. And I think we've forgotten that
in a lot of ministries because we think that we have to be the expert on everything. And
I think it's a good thing to say to people, you know, I don't know the answer to your question,
but I know who to ask. Yes. Every really good word from God comes from God, not from me.
Exactly. You know, I can help you with my opinion, but it's probably not going to do much.
At that point, I'm in the scene, I'm witnessing it. And Peter is going through the I don't know
again. He himself is trying to figure out what are the keys to the kingdom and what is the kingdom.
It's there still he was just a big question marks. And I'm fascinated by how many times
in scripture I witness Jesus saying something that's right there in the text. You can read it,
but I didn't realize it had landed on the first here is like a question mark. Well,
they didn't really know what he just said. Oh, yeah. From an understanding perspective.
And yet they obey. Yeah. They still went the next step. And so at that moment,
I stopped and I said, Jesus, tell me what the keys are. Peter's trying to figure it out. I'm just
like one of the other disciples. I want to know why you gave him to him and what is it that you
gave him. And Jesus said it was a change of heart for him. What do you mean? He said,
he'll deny me later, but he'll repent on such a level that he'll never deny me again. Wow.
And every time his heart transforms and changes, so will the nation. Oh, wow. So the problem is
I'm gay. I've given to the keys to a man that is locked up, messed up, doesn't know what to do with
him. He's going to mess it up before he figures it out. And yet I trust him because he'll never
disobey me when he knows what I want. Wow. He'll disobey me when he doesn't understand,
but not when he knows what I want. OK, as I progress through the word, we see this place where
Peter gets restored and he becomes just extraordinary. We get into the second chapter of Acts.
And then one of the most amazing experiences is he goes to Joppa and spends some time with his
friend. I think that was a fishing vacation. I think he was just tired of jurism and wanted to
get away for a few days. Oh, wow. And he's got an upper room that's a quiet little place. He's been
around the crowds all the time. And, you know, it's got five thousand people clamoring for more.
So he's over there. I think he took a fishing vacation. What a great thought. In the upper
room of the Joppa, you know, not the upper room of the jurism, he's just hanging out with a friend.
They're not putting any pressure on him to do anything. Yeah. And he says he just in prayer
and meditation, spend some time alone, which he probably needed. And then he has this profound
vision of the sheet coming down out of heaven with all these unclean things on it. At that point,
something strange happened. Peter switched from me experiencing it like sort of like a movie where
I'm experiencing the scene, like I'm sitting there in the movie watching what happens. And suddenly
it was alive. Like I'm in the spiritual realm and I'm thrown back in time and I'm sitting there in
time and I'm sitting there in the room with Peter and Joppa. He says something to me now. I don't
know if God just enabled me to see it a little bit deeper this time or if it's because Peter
actually did say something to me. I really can't. I don't recommend going and trying to talk with
somebody that's already past or even the clouds of witnesses. I always don't want to do anything in
the spiritual realm unless Jesus is sitting right there in front of me. And so the Spirit of the
Lord is there. I can see Jesus. But up to that point, I wasn't having very many people converse
with me as if I was a participant. It was more like I was watching and seeing the scenes and I'm a
third party sort of. Now there was a couple of times it was like this, but this time it was
profound because Peter looks at me and says, Timothy, you're a lot like me. Your heart's a lot
like me. And I was like, it is? How so? He said, well, you like the things that God likes. You
care for the things that God wants to care for. You have Father's heart. And he said, I really
cared about the widows and the orphans and the poor. And he said, in my house, that's why I was
taking care of my mother-in-law and I had other widows that came under the care of my household.
So did my mother and my father, my grandfather, grandmother were that way. He said, we always
were trying to help the local widows and orphans because Jerusalem was not running the storehouse
properly. But he said, but you were better than me in one thing. I said, what? I don't feel like I
am. So why do you say that? He said, you love the aliens too. Oh yeah. He said, I didn't, I hated
them. He said, I hated the Romans and I hated the people that had corrupted the nation that were a
part of that system. He said, the scripture that we're supposed to love the blessed, the widows,
the orphans, the poor, the aliens that are among us, be kind to them and those that are in prison.
He says, I was really locked up towards those that were not of Israel. And I said, so is that
what this sheet is? And he said, well, what do you think? It took me three times seeing what's
unclean to be able to eat it only because of the commandment. Don't call unclean what I've called
clean. He said, God never made me, he's not making me eat something unclean. He's making me change my
mind on what I call unclean. That's it. Oh yes. So he's not telling me to sin. He's not telling me
to break the law. He's telling me the law doesn't know what it's talking about on some things.
And one of the things that I'm calling unclean is the Gentiles. But then he said, I mean, this time
he reached into his robe and he pulled out an actual set of keys and I don't know where he got
them. He's like, I got the keys to the kingdom and my heart's locked up. I don't like the Gentiles,
so I can't open the door. That's enormous. So he had to repent. It took him three times having this
encounter before he repents for hating the Gentiles. Wow. And yet if he had not done that,
you and I probably wouldn't be saved. Wow. Now at that moment, this was the first time it happened,
Jesus took me out of the context of the word, the passage that I was reading and suddenly he just
lifts me out of it and transfers me or translates me to the road to Damascus. Oh, wow. And I see
Paul or Saul, I see him on his horse, a donkey, I can't remember, I think it was a horse, and he's
riding with zeal to go kill people of the sect. And he's got malice on his face and he's got
malice on his face and he's got letter in his hand and zeal is emanating from his spirit that he's
going to go kill some people and throw some in prison, which means he's probably going to kill
the heads of the household and throw their wives and children into prison and they'll be sold as
slaves by wrong. Wow. And I see this angel of the Lord standing way down the road. I've never had
read it like this, but I'm looking at the angel and I realized, oh, wow, this guy's like, he's in
trouble. He's about to get whacked by that angel, you know? And then I'm translated again and now
we're in Cornelius' house and Cornelius is praying and he's given arms and he's telling God, here's
what I've done out of the generosity of my heart. Will you be kind to my family? Will you be kind to
my children, my wife, my children? He's asking God, I want to know you. You know, I don't know
you, but I want to know you. If you're the living God, I want to know you. And suddenly that same
angel appears and says to him, you know, send some of your servants to Joppa and ask for Simon Peter.
Wow. It had never dawned on me, nor have I ever heard anybody priest that these three stories
in scripture were simultaneous. Wow. Okay. This is the way the angelic world works,
that the same angel that is telling Cornelius to send for Simon Peter
then leaves Cornelius' house to go confront Saul. Wow. Oh. But he can't confront Saul if Peter
doesn't repent. Wow. Oh my. So the angel standing on the road with a sword drawn,
ready to reveal himself to, he's basically the one of the like angels of the face. He's going to
reveal Jesus to Saul. If he denies Christ at that moment, he's probably going to die.
That's the way it felt with the way I saw it. Wow. And this angel has the power to, it's like
the same, I think he's the same angel that was guarding the garden after Adam and Eve sinned.
Oh my. But he's an angel of the face. His zeal is for Jesus himself and his kingship. So Jesus is
about to show his face to Saul. And if the response is not humility and obedience, Saul's going to die.
Wow. That's the way it felt. And yet Jesus and the angel are going to do nothing if the guy with
the keys doesn't repent. Oh my goodness. Wow. And I said to Jesus, while I'm looking at the road to
Damascus from the word, knowing the weight of what happened in the world when Saul converts.
I said, Jesus, how could you have put this much trust in one man? You gave Peter the keys and he
hates the Gentiles. Why would you have put this much trust in someone that hates the very thing
you're wanting to save? And though it said, because I trust his heart, he's my son. I love that. Wow.
He's not going to disobey me. It's not going to be easy for him to change this, but he's not going
to disobey me. Wow. My kingdom is at stake and I know what I created. It's like I did not create
him to hate the Gentiles. Right. That's not the real Peter. I did not create him to disobey me.
That's not the real Peter. Come on. The one that's a son is the one that will never disobey me. Oh,
I love that. And that's going to emerge on a profound level. So he eats the sheet. He'll
eat whatever's on the sheet. I'm certain this is me. This is my part. I'm adding this. So don't
take this as scripture, but I'm certain it was a pepperoni pizza. The reason why I say that is
because Cornelius was of the Italian cohort. Oh, okay. Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah.
Now the rules for covenant is if you enter into someone's house,
you have to eat whatever's set before you. Right. Yes. And this is why Peter refused to enter into
a Gentile's house because then he's risking having to break the law or break a covenant.
And if he accepts this invitation to come to a Roman centurion's house from the Italian cohort,
he's going to get served some food and he's probably going to get served something that's
not kosher. But the angel of the Lord is single. It seems to be, it's hard to tell a difference
between this angel and Jesus himself. So I think in places in scripture where it references the
angel of the Lord, it's often talking about him or both that they traveled together. And when Jesus
is going to reveal himself, the angel might show up first to pave the way because the glory is
about to break open from the face of Christ himself. And Jesus doesn't always just pop in
alone. He's always, I mean, he's a king, so he comes with attendance. Amen. When people that
have seen him, you rarely see the attendance because he's his glory. They don't want to take
any of his glory away from him. Yeah. But sometimes they precede him. So I realized these three stories
were interwoven and linked together in scripture. I've never seen that from just reading the text,
but by living it out, suddenly this story opens up. And so even Cornelius saying, I was baffled.
I thought my other question was kind of hilarious. I was like, this angel is saying to Cornelius
to send for Peter and he'll tell him what he needs to know to be saved. Why didn't the angel
just tell him how to get saved? Right. Because God has not put the good news just in the hands of the
angelic realm. He's put it in the trust of his sons. And so they can say it, but it doesn't have
the same power to change a heart as it does when we give our testimony. Beautiful. And God wants to
include us and he's designed us to be his body. And so the functioning power of that word needs
us to be a part of the engagement. And even if you think you're just doing a little tiny,
you know, yes to Jesus, you don't always realize how profound it might be in the spiritual realm.
Very true. I was a little baffled though that Cornelius gets this profound visitation from
an angel that he knows is from the Lord. He's praying and seeking God, but he doesn't find him
until his son with the keys shows up. That's just amazing. Wow. Now the fascinating thing about this
is he is the first fruit. Those eight people in his house, when they get saved, that is the first
fruit of the Gentiles being saved all over the earth. True. And first fruits are really important
in scripture. So Jesus even timed this where he's weeping and he's saying, well, I'm going to be
weeping. And he's eating the first, think of it like he didn't get the figs when he came to Jerusalem,
but now he's getting the figs among the Italians. Wow. He ate the first fruits from Italy.
And at the same time, he's got another son that doesn't know he's a son that's on his way to
Damascus to kill everybody. And he's going to intervene and he can't intervene until this act
of obedience is done. So when Cornelius bows his knee and gets saved, Peter's shocked because
Peter just doesn't even get, I laugh at this with what you said when we started, because
I don't like to be long-winded. Now you get the time warp. You don't even know how much time is
bad. So I tell people that when you say something like that about me, we laugh about it. I never
get offended about it, but however, I'm lacking that angel that was there when Peter spoke to
Cornelius' house because Peter didn't even hardly get two sentences out. And the angel knocks him
out of the way and saves everybody and fills them with the spirit. He didn't even give a sermon
about the Holy spirit. And they got waylaid by the power of God. Even though it was only eight
people, the whole house gets saved. And it's so important because it's not just a whole house
getting saved. It's the unlocking of the door for the Gentiles, for the whole earth to now be
weeped. And then again, the angel immediately leaves that room with the people on the floor
with the power of God and goes after Saul. And so now that angel is free to make sure
that Saul doesn't miss the encounter with the face of God. And when Saul gets knocked off of his
horse and he sees a great light and he then hears again, it's a guy that this would be the best
example in scripture. Saul in that condition before his conversion would have been the best
example of someone that said he could see and said he could hear, but it become blinded death.
Yes. To the point where now he's even willing to murder thinking that he's doing something
zealous for God. Right. He's so out of touch with God's heart. But as soon as he has a face to face
encounter with Jesus, he's like, who are you? And well, I'm Jesus. Jesus says a strange thing to him.
He says, why do you kick against the pricks? You all probably know what those are, but the pricks
were like using iron or wood piece that they would put behind the heels of the oxen to keep them from
kicking against the plow or kicking against the pulling the weight of the wagon. So if they got a
little honry and wanted to go sideways, they would end up kicking that spike and it would hit their
tendon in such a way that would just, you know, sort of like getting a little spanking and they'd go
right back to doing what they were created to do. So he's saying to Saul, you're kicking against
the very design that I've created you for. Yeah. You're going to pull a massive amount of weight
for my spirit. You're going to suffer greatly for it, but you're kicking against what I created you
to be. You're trying to be something I didn't make you to be. But now he is blind. Oh, yeah.
He doesn't know what to do or where to go. And he can't even get where he was headed because
it disaffected him so much. Yeah. The other fascinating piece is God already has another
obedient man praying for him. And so we get this last piece of the story where when you know
somebody's a rascal and you know they're nefarious and you know that they probably got you on their
list, their hit list, we're usually praying for God to get us out of it. True, true. And yet in
scripture, there's numerous times where the person that might be on the hit list is actually saying,
God, would you bless that person? Would you show them your face? Would you let them know that you
love them? I'm going to feed their family. I'm going to do the things in scripture you told me
to do instead of considering my life precious. I'm going to pray for the one that wants to kill me.
Amen. And then he gets the word from the Lord. Now this would be a difficult word even if you
were doing all that. Well, God tells him, I need you to go meet that guy that's coming to kill
everybody and pray for him for his eyes to open. Wow. For I have chosen him. Yes. Yeah. Now either
you heard that or you didn't. Right. But I can guarantee you that if he asked anyone he knew
for counsel, they would have said, that's not a word from God. Absolutely. Because God wouldn't
tell you to go fix that guy. He's the one we all want to get rid of. Yeah. And I mean, they knew
what he was coming to do. And this kind of intervention is what I think we've not seen it
often enough because we've usually prayed for ourselves to get out of the problem instead of
for God to get into the problem and fix the instigator. Amen. So the Cornelius is of the
earth and the souls of the earth today need to get a face to face with Jesus. Amen. Wow. Now I
didn't understand this until I went a little deeper from this point. It's like those three passages
interwoven. It was the first time it wasn't the normal go from verse to verse to verse.
The Lord sort of skipped a few places and translated me to so that I could see it. And then I went up
into the heavenly realms, sitting in the throne room of God. I'm pondering, Saul getting saved.
And I've always, I'd always called him Paul. I'd always preached, you know, Paul, even when I'd read
the scripture and it would say, Saul, I would say Paul because to me he was just always Paul.
And in the heavenly realms, he came into the heavenly realms and Jesus called him Saul.
Wow. And I said, Jesus, why did you call him Saul? Like I always call him Paul, you know,
and Jesus looked at him like Saul was his Jewish name. Yep. Paul was his Roman name. That's right.
And his born, the birth name, the name that represents who he is was Saul. Yes. And for the
first time I heard this from the Lord. I had never heard anyone preach this or say this. Jesus said,
Saul is from Tarsus. He's from the city where idolatry was birthed. Oh my. And that statement
that I made to him that I will show you what the things that you must suffer my name say.
He's created to bring idolatry down in the earth. Wow. And to pave a way for the gospel to spread
like a wildfire. But he had to learn to walk in my ways to do it. And so Saul of Tarsus,
don't kick against the pricks is don't stop being Saul of Tarsus. He tried to become a new person
when he became a Roman citizen. Not that that's necessarily all bad, but it's not necessarily the
character that God created. And so he's going to write letters to the early churches for most of
his life and his letters become this immense part of the word, but he, he had to write an Aramaic.
He could have written in Latin because he was a scholar, but he doesn't write his letters to the
churches in Latin nor in Hebrew or Greek or Greek. Even when he's among the Greeks, he writes an
Aramaic because that's what he heard Jesus speak. And why did Jesus speak Aramaic when he was alive?
Yeah. It was a mystery until I was in the heavenly realms. I didn't understand.
I didn't value Aramaic. In fact, my dad really valued the Greek and the Hebrew.
And my dad had had a discussion one time with me about Aramaic and said that it was pretty easy
to understand if you understood ancient Hebrew. But that was as far as our conversation. He never
really tutored me in that. And so in the throng, I said, Jesus, why did Peter understand you? I mean,
most of the conversations would have been you speaking Aramaic and why does Saul have, you know,
that in his letters? And Jesus said, because the ancient Aramaic was almost the same as the ancient
Hebrew. And it was the language I used when I spoke with my mouth and created the universe,
not Aramaic, but ancient Hebrew. And when I wrote with my finger, if you were Aramaic or if you were
an ancient student of Hebrew, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between those two
languages, except in the way that some of the things were pronounced and a few ways the letters
were written were different, but the meanings was almost exactly the same. So if you could speak one,
you could speak the other. And he said, when I was speaking Aramaic, it was pretty much considered
the common language. And it was still so closely related to ancient Hebrew that I liked conversing
with it more than I did with the modern interpretation of Hebrew. And I said, I don't get that. I don't
even understand why that's important. And he said to me, well, when my people were out of covenant
with me and had broken covenant were far from me, were not listening, were not repairing,
were not fixing it, were not even paying attention, they killed their prophets that I sent to them.
I sent them into exile in Babylon. And while they were in Babylon in a fallen state out of covenant
with me, they completely reinvented their language. And they deviated massively from what I wrote with
my finger. You know, that just doesn't happen very much. Usually a language gets sort of conglomerated
with another people group if you spend an extended amount of time among. So they should have come out
of Babylon with some mixture between Hebrew and Babylonian. Like Creole, you know, been
Heo or something. Instead, they come out with a complete massive revision of their language
with the way it was pronounced and the way it was written and possibly even some of the meetings.
And for the first time, I thought, well, I've always wanted to learn Hebrew.
And Jesus said, you remember the question you had when you asked me to hear, and I spoke to you in
English. If I had spoke to you in the language I created the universe, you would have heard me
speaking ancient Hebrew. And if you could speak Aramaic, you would have understood it.
Wow. They said, if I spoke to you in modern Hebrew, you would have not known what I was saying.
And I said, does that a bad thing then? Like, cause that's every Jew I know loves the
modern Hebrew and every scholar I know, biblical scholar, that's what they're studying.
So the bad thing, he said, no, it's not a bad thing. It still has a lot of the revelation and
meanings. It's worth studying. But he said, the problem with the modern language is you can't
tell what's defiled in it. But if you go back to the ancient language, it's designed to keep
defilement out. And so in order to understand a deeper level of what I'm saying and to understand
what I'm saying and comprehend fully what I'm saying and not misinterpreted it, the language
is a part of it. And the simpler it is, the easier that is to keep it from defilement.
So I'm grappling with this today. Now I'm saying all that because it's important to understand
that as we are getting better and better at trying to hear God and obey him, we've got to
comprehend how he feels about language, especially the languages of the earth. God does not mind
someone being sent to another people and speaking to them in their language with the good news so
he can win them over. But when it comes to creating, he speaks his language. Because
that's what sets the elements in motion. That's what creates light. The frequencies of the original
letters are the foundational substance for creation itself. We're going to probably one day see a
generation go full circle and God will unlock that language again in a way that will the word of God
will come alive in a way we've never known. Last piece of this, while I was trying to learn how
to do this, he took me to Zechariah. Zechariah starts out with a really interesting word. It says
Zechariah one. It starts out with a vision. Zechariah sees a vision. An angel or to stand there
might be the same angel, but it's again uses that phrase, the angel or so the angel or says,
Zechariah, what do you see? Zechariah says, I see a scroll flying through the heavens.
Flying through the heavens. All right. Now stop the tape. Not literally, but he's a prophet.
So he's hearing something he's supposed to prophesy. If he stopped the encounter at that
moment and left to go prophesy, what would we hear is there's a scroll flying through the heavens.
Right. That's that the Lord, there's a scroll flying through the heavens. The body of Christ
then tries to pull out of prophets and teachers, what they want to understand about what God is
saying. Right. It's not always what God wants us to understand. We have a tendency to want to pull
out what we want to filter or understand it. Could we try to apply it to ourselves? You know,
was that a word for me? Is that going to fix my problem? Because, you know, my life story must
be on some scroll in the heavens. Is God talking about me? You know, I've got a real serious problem
right now that I need fixed. You know, is there something on that scroll that's going to fix
my thing? That's what we do to prophets. And yet a seer is not supposed to tell you anything that
he doesn't understand. He's supposed to just tell you what he saw and that's it. Right. So that's
why I say stop the tape. That's all he needs to do is put the vision on the table and say,
this is all I know. I saw a scroll flying through the heavens. Well, now what is it? You know,
what does it say? Well, it took the angel of the Lord to add the interpretation. Yes. And now this
is what's scary. The angel says, this is the sword of the Lord that has gone out throughout the whole
earth and it will enter into every house of the thief and the liar. It's a judgment. It's going
to deal with lying and thieving. Now you would not have been able to interpret or prophesy a sword
if you had not heard what the angel said. Right. So right now all over the earth, I'm getting a bit
perplexed and concerned about many of my seer friends, me included, who are seeing profound
things in the heavenly realms. The heavens are thinner than they've ever been in my lifetime.
Massive amounts of revelation are being shown to people all over the earth.
And yet if your gift is seeing and not hearing, then you better connect with another part of the
body of Christ or lean on Jesus himself to make sure you hear and see. Yes. Again, this is that
tendency that if you say you can see, you might become blind. If you say you can hear, you might
become deaf. So if the seer says, I can hear also, he's going to interpret this wrong. And then just
ask me direct question. He said, Timothy, how many messages do you know and are aware of and
having your possession on scrolls? I said, well, Jesus, I could name a dozen close friends that
have a teaching about scrolls. He said, yes, they don't know it's a sword. Wow. What? Because this
is some good teaching. I got some friends that have some good stuff on this. Are you saying it's
all wrong? He said, no, it's not all wrong. Some of it is a scroll. Sometimes I show somebody scroll
and tell them it's a scroll. But for Zachariah, if he had prophesied a scroll, he would have been
interpreting wrong what I was showing it. It's not that it wasn't seeing a scroll is that he doesn't
know what it is. And this is where language is really a problem because our meaning of a scroll
is very limited in English. But in the ancient Hebrew, a scroll and a sword could use some of
the same letters. And so when God uses language, it has this multiple capacity to affect every
dimension of creation. And we have a very limited understanding of it because we apply that scripture
or that does say the Lord to a word that we can create a picture and know what that I know what
a scroll is. It's a piece of paper that's rolled up somewhere. Or not, you know, if you understand
his language, then it's not a piece of paper with something written on it. It's a sword.
Right. Then Lord took this deeper. He said, all right, talk to me about your friends.
I have teaching about scrolls, all of them. He said, I want you to commend them. I'm not against
them because they all saw a scroll. But some of them didn't hear. They didn't stick around the
encounter long enough to hear what it was. So now their interpretation of what it is, it's going to
be based more on what the body of Christ tries to pull out of them instead of what I actually said.
And it's difficult for people that are revered and respected and honored and on the stage speaking,
it's difficult for them to say, I had this profound encounter in the spiritual realm and
all I saw was a scroll. That's it. That's my whole sermon. There you go. You guys can do
something with that. And now everybody in the crowd is going, well, what is that? What do I do with
it? What, you know, can we read it? How does it apply to me? All that stuff. And they want to be
ministered to not just Todd. If you step into that, when you don't have the angelic piece,
or you don't have the piece that he's going to give to another part of the body,
then you're going to transgress and you're gifting. And this is what ruined Balaam.
Oh yeah. This is Balaam wasn't a false prophet because he prophesied wrong.
All of his prophecies were spot on accurate. He was a false prophet because he stepped into teaching
and he taught the enemies of God how to defile Israel. He's called a false prophet because he
tried to teach when he was called to be a prophet and he was actually more of a seer than a prophet.
He should have just said, this is what I see. That's all I'm allowed to do.
Yeah. And if you're not wanting to pay me, because that's all I'm allowed to do then,
then so be it. But to get paid and to fulfill what they hired him for, he transgresses his gift
and tells them how to disrupt what God wants to do. Yeah.
Right now in the body of Christ, we've got a little bit of a problem with this,
where lots of seers are transgressing this way and it's not all their fault. Mostly I blame about
90% of it on the condition of the body of Christ that wants to pull out of them more than God
gave them. And also we don't like talking about judgment. So we have a little secret friendly
church out there and they don't want to talk about judgment that God forbid that a sword would enter
out there and deal with thieves and liars. Well, why don't we want God to deal with the thieves?
Oh, please, please. That doesn't really sound like a bad thing.
But what if the thief and liar is us? Come on. Well, yeah.
How did I become a thief in God's house with something prophetic?
Come on. Well, I can tell you, there's a lot of
prophecies out there that people are going to be like, oh, I'm going to be a thief.
I'm going to be a thief. And so we have a lot of prophecies out there that were prophesied by
someone unknown and then got re prophesied by somebody well known. There are a lot of,
I don't want to say this in a way that sounds condemning, but there's a lot of,
I call it poetic prophecies that aren't actually real prophecies. They're just
pun little things like, you know, 11 11, we sort of put things together because it sounds good.
And it isn't always a thus, say, Lord, this is going to happen. Sometimes it's just a good word.
Now there's nothing wrong with a good word. But when we say it's the word of the Lord,
if it's not, we get in trouble. And sometimes I find lots of the body of Christ that's in ministry.
We process so many things from someone else. And now that we have the internet,
we've got a proliferation of teaching and you know, you got Bibles on, you know, I got six
Bibles in my phone now. And I get something every day from somebody in the world that's,
you know, a word from God. And we process so much information now that it's easy to forget where you
got it. And it's pertinent, it's relevant, it's something important. We resonate with it. So we
go out and we tell somebody else about it. Now, God always gives honor to whom honor is due in
scripture. Yes. Sometimes he leaves it a little ambiguous where he says a certain man, but at
least he tells you a certain man. He doesn't allow anybody to take credit for a word that it wasn't
given to them. And so in the body of Christ, though, we tend to like celebrity status among
ministries and we often regurgitate words from the Lord, even though that's not a bad thing to say,
so-and-so prophesied this, you need to hear it. Here's what this guy said. If we honor that person
and give them that place that God gave them by giving them the word first, then when we repeat
the word, it's a blessing to another part of the body of Christ. That's the right way to do it.
Yeah. Many ministries sometimes transgress in this where they forget who they heard it from.
And so they tell it as if it came from them. Well, that's a liar. Wow. I've got a pastor friend
that admitted to me about 12 years ago that he wasn't hearing God very well and he hadn't been
hearing for quite a while. So all of his sermons were stuff he found on the internet. Oh, he just
would, he said, it's easy. You can, 15 minutes I can, I can find a good sermon on the internet.
And then I just, I just, you know, make a few notes and I preach that at my church.
By his own admission, I'm in a fallen state. I'm not hearing God right. Something's wrong,
but the people still need a message every, every Sunday. So I got to give them something.
Well, you're not serving them bread. You're giving them something that God may not be saying
or at least he said it to someone else. It may not apply to your people, but you're force-feeding
them something without life in it. Wow. Cause it didn't come from your spirit, from your encounter
with God. Therefore the, if the language takes on life when it comes from God's heart to me.
And then if I say, this is what God said, I'm not lying if I really heard God, but if I didn't hear
God, but if I didn't hear him, I should say, this is what God said to someone else. I think
it's relevant and you need to hear it. That's perfectly fine. But if we take credit for it
and we let people believe that I've been with God when I have it. And I heard this word when it
should be honoring someone else. We just stole something from another part of the body and we
lied to the people that we got it from God. Wow. This is an immediate disqualifier for the move of
God. Yeah. The move of God is on in the earth right now. It's moving like a freight train and
much of the body of Christ has disqualified itself for the glory, even though they're praying fervently
for God to fill their sanctuary with his glory. And they're not going to get it until we repent
for that very simple thing of don't say that you can see if you know you're not seeing well. And
don't say you can hear if you know you're not hearing well. Go deeper, ask God to help you go
deeper. And then you can come out of an encounter and say, thus says the Lord, because I had an
encounter with God. Even if it's nothing, but I see a scroll and somebody else has to add the other
relevant piece before we can do something with it. Just say what God says and nothing else.
And so getting to this place where Jesus achieved, and I think he wants to help many of us where he
said, I only say what I hear my father say. I only do what I see my father doing. That's the
side of maturity that all the sons and daughters need to get to. If you want to do another session,
I'd like to go a little deeper with this idea of what Saul opened up for the earth. And I think
we're in the move of God that he laid a foundation for now. Okay. Would you pray for our listeners?
Let's come back together and let's go deeper. But right now, let's pray for our listeners.
Father, I thank you very much for those that are listening to this message. And I just,
I'm so thankful for a ministry like Global Outpouring. I ask your anointing and your
presence to increase on them and upon those that are connected with them. And I pray fervently for
those that hear this message. Oh, that you would shine a light on them. Yes. Yes. That you would
help them be able to go deeper into your heart. I pray specifically that in you, they will find
their hope and glory. Yes. And you in them, in me, everything that's important is when I discover
you in me. You are the hope of glory. Yes. There is no glory until we can discover you within.
Often praying for you to come and help us without and to fix something in the earth. And yet we
haven't found you in the secret place. We made ourselves your temple where you want to dwell and
fill us to the brim. I pray for the listeners. Would you sweep out the temple? Would you cleanse
your own temple? Would you do whatever's necessary in them to open up their ability to see you,
to hear you, to encounter you? Yes, Lord. To know you and to be your friend. Yes, Lord.
And enable them with your grace to go deeper. Yes, Father. We ask you for the length of breath,
the height, the width and the depth of your word and of your presence. And in you,
we live and move and have our being. And so we pray that you would set us free and let us live
by being in you and let our entire being come alive from quicken our mortal spirit to be what
you originally created us to be. Yes, Lord. I ask you to remove from us any stubbornness of heart
or anything that would kick against the pricks. Yes, Lord. Don't let me be found ever saying no
to you. Yes. I ask you to trust many more in our day with the keys to your kingdom. Yes, Lord.
Same way you did Peter. You would give them power to open the doors of righteousness in the earth
for your glory. Yes, Lord. And trust them to obey you in those strategic moments. Yes, Father.
And if they tend to not obey you, deal with them again and again and again. Yes,
Father. Even as you did Peter, until they understand it. And they'll always say yes when
they understand it. Thank you, Father. I pray for just in the region where global outpouring is,
that whole Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas area. Yes, Lord. I ask you, would you
shine a great light like you did in the ancient area? Yes, Lord. Yes, Father. The text around
Capernaum and Galilee, you said you shined a great light. Yes. Would you do that in that region also
so that even those that don't know you can find you? Yes, Father. Yes, Lord. Open the heavens over
our head and keep the veil thin that we could come through, that we might have encounters with you.
Yes, Lord. I pray to do something supernatural in our day. I ask you for the listeners to this
broadcast. Would you put your finger in their ear and open their hearing? Yes, Father. Would you
spit in their eye if necessary and let them see? Yes, Lord. But then would you lay your hand on
their heart and give them your heartbeat? Yes, Father. Thank you, Father. Just speak it and it
will be done. Say to their heart to be like yours. Yes. Thank you, Jesus. It will come into resonance
with you. Then they'll know what makes you laugh. They'll know what makes you cry. Yes, Lord.
They'll have a heart after you the way David did. Yes. Yes, Lord. It's so easy for you to do that.
It's so hard for us to find that. So I ask you to enable them with your power in your right hand.
Yes. Thank you, Jesus. If you say it, it will be done. Yes, Father. I ask you as a father,
would you bless your people and would you let us now enter into your zeal? Yes. To give to our king
what he deserves in this hour. Yes, Lord. Oh, that we might know him as the king of kings. Oh, yes.
And see him in his glory. Yes, yes, yes. And know how to do our part in giving him the glory,
the honor, the majesty. Yes. Thank you, Jesus. The name above every name. Yes, Lord. I pray
as people listen to this, we ask you to lift up Jesus. Yes. We lift you up and say, you have
preeminence over us and everything. Yes. Therefore draw all men unto you. Yes, Lord. In the name of
Jesus. Amen. Amen.
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You can also browse our web store for life-changing anointed books. Until next time, this is Sharon
Buss and I'm Philip Buss. God bless you with this overwhelming loving presence.