Don’t Blame me; it was the Boss’s Idea

Over the weekend, my job was to drive the evangelist John Bevere around. He was speaking at my church.

Usually I don’t like hauling VIPs around. It’s boring, and they don’t pay much attention to you. You find yourself standing around at the mall while they look at shoes, or you drive their luggage places while they’re having dinner with church bigwigs. Stuff like that. But I enjoyed meeting Mr. Bevere. He was very humble, and he spoke and acknowledged my existence, even though he was busy the whole time.

Unfortunately, I got pulled over while he was in my truck. There was some kind of bizarre screwup with my registration. I had no idea it was messed up. We ended up sitting in a parking lot for fifteen minutes while a cop sorted things out and gave me a reduced fine. John was kind enough to pray.

He gave a wonderful sermon. The best guest sermon I’ve heard. It was basically the same thing I keep telling people: God wants to do it for you. He came at it from a different angle, but it’s really the same thing. Christians get saved, and then they go home and look at porn and cheat on their spouses and take drugs, and they never have any power in their lives, and they can’t change their behavior. It’s not supposed to be like that. We are supposed to have power. Eternal life is swell, but if that’s all you get, you should literally live like a psychopath until ten minutes before you die and then ask for forgiveness. The power is supposed to flow here on earth, not just in heaven.

I bought his book. I have to be honest; I think we get some preachers who are utterly full of it, and I almost never buy their stuff. I think some of them are just DVD salesmen. I don’t know if they’re unrepentant con artists who have learned to speak Christianese, or whether they’ve just got themselves fooled.

We have a recurrent guest who is supposed to be a prophet, and I don’t even want to say what my impression of him is. I got a free book by a guest, for donating to one of our church’s ministries, and it’s somewhere at the bottom of my closet, under a bunch of crap. But I bought John Bevere’s book, because I felt sure what he said came from God, and I thought he probably knew more about this message than I did.

I haven’t looked at the book yet. Watch me endorse it without reading it and then open it and find out it’s full of new age gobbledygook. I don’t think that will happen, though.

The Holy Spirit works. If you pray in tongues a lot, you will start to get revelation. The Bible will start to make sense to you. The missing pieces will show up. God never created a human being smart enough to understand it with the unaided mind. If you have a consistent habit of praying in the Spirit for long periods, God’s power and wisdom will grow in you like a tree you water and fertilize every day. Like a mustard tree, as one very smart person put it. God doesn’t want you to do it on your own. He wants to do all the heavy lifting. You just have to drop your pride and admit you’re a charity case.

When you get revelation coming to you regularly, you will find that when “brilliant” evangelists tell you things, very often, you already know them. And it helps you judge what’s worth receiving and what is just plain puke.

Revelation is part of the power God gives people here on earth. Because I had revelation, which comes by grace, I was able to judge John’s message, the subject of which was grace. That worked out pretty good.

Satan hates this message. We are conceived–literally–as potentially godlike beings when we receive salvation and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Satan wants us to be stillborn, so we will die weak, without taking the world back from him. He tells us tongues are nonsense. He tells us Christianity is about discipline and hard work, and that we have to earn it all. He tells us it’s trashy and immature to ask God for things we don’t deserve. The truth is that God wants us to have things we don’t deserve, without earning them. Hello? That’s why he allowed himself to be nailed to a cross. Why would he buy us salvation and then refuse to buy us anything else?

God has a whole shop full of power tools waiting for each of us. How would you feel if you ran a garage and the mechanics refused to touch the air tools? Imagine it. They come to you and they say, “We’ll turn the nuts by hand because we’re not worthy of air tools.” You’d want to strangle them. They’d put your shop out of business.

People always wonder why God doesn’t fix the world. He never said he would. He created humanity to fix the world. Look it up. Read the Bible. Adam was the world’s manager. God expects us to be proactive. He doesn’t look down and see bad things happening and think, “Wow, I better fix that.” He thinks, “Someone should be praying for me to fix that. Someone should be trying to fix that and praying for my help. Someone should be using the gifts of the Spirit to fix that.”

He wants us to be in charge. He wants us to do mighty things. He wants us to have supernatural power. And he wants us to get that power by faith, not works.

The world is never going to work right until the Messianic Age. The kingdom of God is inside us. It’s not a political kingdom that will spread and rule the globe. We are not going to become a super church that cleans up the world until it’s so perfect, it’s as if Adam never sinned. But each of us is supposed to do powerful things and change as much of the world as we can. Think of the police. They don’t eradicate crime, but they don’t quit, either. They tackle the jobs they have the power to tackle, and the results, though imperfect, justify the effort. God doesn’t want the world to be perfect right now, but for reasons of his own, he wants us to battle to improve it, by putting his power inside as many people as possible.

We will never make the world right in this age, and neither will God, but we are supposed to clean it up as much as we can, and we are supposed to play offense. We can’t do it with our pathetic minds and flimsy meat bodies.

I’m still not crazy about driving evangelists around, but I’m glad I met this one. I hope his book lives up to my expectations.