'The Life of the Early Church - Part 1 — Glenn Meldrum

Father, we come before you now in the precious name of Jesus, and we ask that you would speak. Holy Spirit, we invite you to come and do the work you were sent to this planet to do, to convict of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.

We invite you to come, Holy Spirit, to come as a holy fire to burn the garbage out of our lives, and to bring conversion to those who are not truly saved, and to bring a sanctifying work to those who are.

So we invite your presence here, in the wonderful name of Jesus. What we are looking at for the next four messages is we're going to look at the life of the early church, and this is actually going to be the foundation of it.

I have to lay the foundation before we can go any further, because the reality is you cannot shepherd goats or wolves or cats. You understand? The only ones who can be discipled are sheep, and until you become a sheep, you can't be discipled because you are not part of the flock of God.

You don't belong to him, and so we have to begin at square one. We have to begin at the importance of the book of Acts, and what that's all about, and I think we miss that because we have a terrible, terrible problem in the church in America is that we do not know what biblical Christianity is.

We have allowed so much baggage and so many things be built on top of it, and all the doctrines we try to make and protect ourselves from the reality of God, and we have all this stuff that's there that keeps us from that place of fellowship, but we have doctrine.

We have church. We have beautiful churches, but they're empty of the Holy Ghost. They're empty of the reality of a God that wants to be near and present, but we've got the infrastructure. We've got the machinery to make all this go, but none of the oil of the Holy Ghost to make it work, and so we've missed it all, and so we need to look at the book of Acts, and actually what we're going to do is we're going to look at one small little section that is a snapshot of the life of the early church, and what I mean by the early church is when you get into theology, they try and get a little more specific, and you can have what is called the primitive church, which would be that first generation of believers, and then the early church is really going to be the first three centuries of the church until Emperor Constantine came to power, but just for ease, I'm going to refer to the early church as that first generation in these messages, and that's what I want to focus on, those first believers, and so turn with me to Acts chapter 2, and we're going to look at verses 41 through 47.

I'm reading out of the 1984 NIV. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, and to the fellowship, and to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.

All the believers were together and had everything in common, selling their possessions and goods they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people, and the Lord added daily to their number those who were being saved.

Like I said, this is a snapshot of the early church, the life of the early church, and what made the early church the early church is the life that they lived, and we are not going to see the power of the early church until we're willing to live what they were willing to live, until we're willing to walk as what they walked, and if I could say it like this, if there was ever a time in the history of the church, the purest form of Christianity would have been in that first generation.

Those who saw Jesus, heard his words, walked with him, talked with him, knew the miracles and the signs and the wonders and the events that took place of his death, of his resurrection, of his ascension, those who saw that, who knew that, and were so close to the initial teaching and the definition that was behind those teachings, those were the ones, if I could say it like that, were the purest in Christianity.

What happened, it didn't take long, what happened is man got involved in it, and when man gets involved in it, he corrupts whatever he touches, it's just the reality. You can have a wonderful move of God, a genuine revival taking place, and once man gets into it, that's the end of it, it ruins it.

With the 1904 Welch revival, they had a little saying, it's first God moved, then the devil moved, and then God moved more powerfully, and then man moved and God left. That's what happens, man gets in it, and so it makes a mess of everything, and so it didn't take long until that corruption started happening, and then you had the people called Judaizers, that were trying to make people that were going to be Christian, that they first had to become Jewish, and then through Judaism to become Christian, so they wanted to lay upon them all the legalistic requirements of the Mosaic law.

And then you had Gnosticism trying to creep into the church and get its way into it, and Paul deals with it in some various places in his epistles, because Gnosticism was this idea of a secret mystery knowledge, and only those who had that secret mystery knowledge was right with God, or could get right with him, and all the corruption that gets in there, by the time you get to Revelation chapter 2 and 3, you have this corruption that gets into many of the churches, from sexual immorality to all kinds of other perversions and distortions and false doctrines, and it didn't take long, so if we want to see the purity of the church, we need to look right there at the beginning, because what the church was in the beginning is what God wants the church to be today.

But we are so divided in denominations and the breaks within denominations, so that they're divided into other denominations, and all the splits and all the chaos and all the madness, because man gets into the midst of it all, and messes it all up.

And instead of going back to the book and saying, what is this faith to look like? We continue to do what we have done, we've done year after year, century after century, the same type of thing, with different names and different things added to it, but it's still the same old dead religion that happened as we got away from the life of the early church.

So you look at that pure form of Christianity, and you see life, you see purity, you see zeal and passion, you see the Holy Spirit power with signs and wonders, and that's where God wants the church to be today.

Now you can go and say, I don't believe that the Holy Spirit is there for us anymore today, and if not, if you believe that, then there's no hope of salvation for you, because you can't get saved without the Holy Spirit.

I'll guarantee you, he has to come to you and convict you of sin, righteousness, and judgment. If you think the days of the apostles was the only days that the Spirit of God was there to do those things, then you have misread the Word.

You have become enslaved in doctrine, because that's what doctrine has taught you, not the Word of God. There's not one single verse anywhere in the Bible that tells us that Pentecost stopped with the days of the apostles, not one verse, not one single verse, and yet churches build whole doctrines out of it.

They have conventions and conferences against the Holy Spirit, yet they have no verse, not one single verse in which to base that upon. And so you look at the baggage that gets upon the church, and heaps and heaps and heaps upon it that binds it and keeps it from moving when God wants to bring liberty to us.

We are in desperate need of New Testament Christianity, not the status quo. A .W. Tozer said, if we have a revival of the type of Christianity we have today, it will take us a century to recover from it.

That's what's going on, a revival of the flesh, revival of dead Christianity, of dead religion. We have it all over the seeker-sensitive movement, and then you can even go even more apostate into the emergent church, explosive movements, humongous churches, and all they are is valleys of dead bones, because we have gotten away from what the early church is all about and what they looked like and how they lived.

So we need to learn what is normal Christianity. Not normal by the church's standard, normal by God's standard. That's why the book was given to us. That's why the book of Acts was given to us, so we could look at it and see what life is really all about.

We will never be in ancient Rome again. Those exact historical events will never take place again. And so we look at it not in the aspect of saying, God, reproduce that culture again. It's not that. We are to cry out, God, reproduce that life again.

That life spans all cultures and all nations and all eras. It is not subject to the opinions of man or anything else. When we are willing to go back to the book and say, God, that's what we must have, then we'll begin to see that kind of life come into us and work through us.

And so we're going to, in this study, look at what made the early church grow and why the power of God was there. And until we're willing to go back to that, we will not see that made manifest in us. But we have to begin at square one.

We have to begin here at the very, very basic. And I hope I can press this home because it's been talked about a whole lot already this morning. And so God is wanting to say something very, very clearly.

We have to begin at conversion. We have to begin at the place of what does it mean to become a true follower of Jesus. This is serious because you know what we've reduced Christianity to? Anybody here want to be a Christian?

Just raise your hand. I mean, can you give me even one example of that in scripture? One example of that? You want to know why we do that? I want you to hear what I'm going to say. You want to know why preachers do that?

Because we've watered down the gospel. And in watering down the gospel, we want to take the offense of the cross away from it to make it as easy for people to enter in. But the problem is they don't enter in.

Because if we don't do it his way, as we will see in the book of Acts here, then they don't do it at all. So you can have all kinds of churches filled with people that raise their hands and have never yet really abandoned themselves to God.

So they have their sex addictions and their drug addictions. And as marijuana is legalized across this nation, they'll be smoking dope before they go to church or smoking dope in church. I mean, we don't understand how far the church has fallen and how it will continue to plummet until there are those that are really willing to come to the place of what true conversion is.

You see, you cannot find in the book of Acts conversion that is not radical. You cannot find it. It is radical. It is absolutely radical. It is revolutionary. It transforms the person. That's why all the people, they can raise their hands and stay the same, live the same kind of life, have the same condition of their marriage, and all the same things going on.

But they raise their hand, they pray that magical prayer, but they deceive themselves because when conversion enters the soul of an individual, it is revolutionary. And if it's not revolutionary, then you have not been born again.

Jesus used the illustration of being born again because it is so graphic. You have a child in darkness in the womb. If that child stays in that womb, it kills both mother and child. That child to have life must break through that womb into a brand new life in light.

It is radical. It's not this little itty bitty slow coming to. It is this revolution coming out of darkness into light, a transformation of everything that that child would know. And it's the same for us.

It tells us in the 41st verse of Acts chapter 2, those who accepted his message were baptized and about 3 ,000 were added to their number that day. So Peter preached through the power of the Holy Spirit.

God never, ever, ever designed the preaching to be void of the Spirit of God. It was always designed to be the Word and the Spirit working together, never separate. Because when you separate it some way or another, it's going to be perverted.

And so it has to be together. And so Peter preached on the anointing of the Holy Spirit and 3 ,000 were added. Not 3 ,000 hand raisings. Not 3 ,000 people just saying, well, I'd like to join the club.

But the reason why it said that they were baptized was because the cost. Because they would be persecuted now. They were making a public proclamation that I am now forsaking my old life of sin, my old way of living, and I'm going to follow Jesus.

The people that were there were going for Pentecost, going to that festival. They were religious people going. The pagan ones, the ones that were still in their sin and the madness of this world, they stayed home and continued partying.

These were the religious people that were going. And they're the ones confronted because they were lost in their religion. They were dead in trespasses and sin because they had no concept of what it meant to truly know God.

And so they had radical. I want you to hear what I'm going to say here. They had radical encounters with God. And you know what radical encounters with God does? It produces radical converts. And radical converts make radical disciples.

I was a young man. I was strung out on drugs in a park where I used to party and deal drugs. This God broke into my world. And I was instantly delivered from drugs and alcohol and smoking. I was transformed in a moment.

It was radical. It was revolutionary. And it makes radical disciples. And you know what I do all the time today? I go and say, God, where are those kind of conversions? Why did it happen back then in the 70s in that hippie movement, Jesus movement?

Why did it happen back then? And why aren't we seeing it today? Why? Because we have forsaken the book of Acts. We've forsaken the truth that is there of what conversion really is. And so they were baptized, a costly act in that culture.

They would be persecuted. They would be, many of them, kicked out of their synagogues. I don't have time to get into that, but we don't understand how serious it is. Because now, at that time, the synagogue was central to a community because you could only walk so far as a Jew on the Sabbath.

You had to be able to walk from your home to the synagogue and back again without breaking the law. And so they lived all around the synagogue. Everything revolved around that. It wasn't a Sunday or Saturday morning type of event.

Their entire life revolved around it. And so we fail to understand the cost of that, to say, OK, I'm going to be a follower of Jesus. Says, you cannot come to the synagogue anymore. Now you are excommunicated from the community there.

You are blackballed. Everything about you now is going to be just, it's going to be terrible for your family and everything. The cost of it was tremendous. This was not some flippant little hand raising and saying, OK, I'm going to be a follower of Jesus.

But you still live your own life. Everything was revolutionized. And it tells us that it was on that day it happened. You see, the Bible teaches instantaneous conversion. And that's an important thing, because that's under attack.

The emergent church, some of the major voices within the emergent church, which is an apostate religion. It's apostate. It's not even, it is seeker sensitive on steroids. And they have come out, they have come out and say, the worst thing that has ever happened to Christianity is those preachers who preach instantaneous conversion.

Why do they preach that? Because they've never been saved. So unsaved people not wanting to have the conviction of the Holy Spirit, they say that's not how it happens. But you cannot show me that in scripture, because the scripture speaks of the instantaneous nature of conversion.

I was once in darkness, now I'm in light. This radical transformation. And if you've not had that radical transformation, no matter what you say to yourself, you are not a saved man. We know what it says by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, that many will say unto me, Lord, Lord.

But they didn't know him. Depart from me. Religious words, all the religious actions, but no relationship. They had the doctrine down pat, but no relationship. They were not truly born again. They didn't break out of the darkness of this world into the wonder of life in Christ.

And so they stayed in their religion, thinking they were OK, and end up on their way to hell. 3 ,000 were saved that day. And you know, this is so phenomenal. 120 people, in Acts chapter one, it tells us that 120 people is what made up the church, even though Paul tells us that over 500 people saw Jesus ascend into heaven.

So what happened to those other 350? I'm not really sure. They were fringe or whatever. They hadn't made their mind up, but they were there. They saw the reality of Christ resurrected. OK, the resurrected Christ, then they saw him ascend into heaven.

Then they heard those two angels, saw those two angels and heard the angels. They wouldn't testify that the same Jesus you see going up like this is going to come back like that. They saw it, but yet out of that, there were still only 120.

Imagine 120 disciples trying to deal with 3 ,000 newborn babes in Christ. You want to talk about a mess? It would be tough stuff, but guess what? God was there to help. But here's the thing that I've come to learn is genuine revival, because that's what's taking place here, genuine revival.

Genuine revival only does certain things, and it cannot and will not do other things. One of the things that it does is it saves. It brings people to the place to see the reality of their sin and the conviction of the Holy Spirit there to bring them to repentance.

But revival does not disciple. That is the church's direct, purposeful act to get involved in the lives of these newborn babes and teach them what it means to walk with Jesus, how to die to self, how to live in the resurrection life of Christ.

And so Peter, on the day of Pentecost, in Acts chapter two, verses 22 through 24, so Peter's preaching here, and he says, "'Men of Israel, listen to this. "'Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God "'to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, "'which God did among you through him, "'as you yourselves know.

"'This man was handed over to you "'by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, "'and you, with the help of wicked men,' referring to the Gentiles, Romans, "'put him to death by nailing him to the cross. "'But God raised him from the dead, "'freeing him from the agony of death, "'because it was impossible for death "'to keep its hold on him.'".

Do you hear what's being said there? Very important. It wasn't saying, how many of you want a better life? How many of you want happiness and joy? Jesus wants to give you happiness and joy. Want to raise your hand?

Let me see that hand. Oh, I see that hand. I see that hand. You know what he did? You are guilty of crucifying Christ. You are responsible in his death. That was the love of God. Do you understand? That was the love of God.

It's not the love of God when preachers preach some watered-down, wishy-washy type of message that leaves people in their sins, and they can walk out of a church thinking they're okay, because they prayed a little prayer, but there was no revolution in their life.

It was the love of God that brought to them the reality of their sins, through a man that was being willing to be bold enough under the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the truth of who this God was.

And so what happened? You had the results of what that kind of preaching really does. In verses 37 and 39, it says, "'When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart "'and said to Peter and the other apostles, "'Brothers, what shall we do?'.

"'Peter replied, Raise your hands.'. "'No, he didn't. "'Repent and be baptized every one of you "'in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, "'and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

"'The promise is for you.'". Uh-oh, we got this problem here now. "'This problem is for you and your children "'and for all who are far off, "'for all whom the Lord our God will call.'". Guess what? He didn't say that the power of the Holy Spirit would stop with the apostles.

Right there, he says it's for every generation. And so if you continue to hold to that, you are basically just saying, okay, I don't believe that verse. I believe it stopped, even though I don't have a verse to support my belief.

You see, Peter was loving the people enough to tell them exactly what they needed to do, loving them enough to say, you need to repent, and you need to bring forth fruit as what John the Baptist said, in keeping with repentance.

What was the initial fruit? Baptism, water baptism. It doesn't save. Okay, water baptism does not save. It's a testimony to a world of what salvation has happened, what it's done inside of you. That I was once lost, now I'm found, and it's this testimony of what God has done.

That's the whole purpose of it, that we come out and we are willing to be bold enough to say, this is what has happened to me, and this is what God can do through you. The purpose of water baptism is a testify of Christ, and to take the person out of this mediocre type of religion into the place of saying, it must be what defines the entirety of your life.

Jesus will not be part of your life. He will either be the definer of your life, or you will define your life and not have Jesus. It's that black and white. Now, we don't like that, do we? In our culture, we don't want that.

You know, just tell me sweet nothings so I can feel good about myself and go home and go to hell. Because that's what it does, you understand. The truth sets people free, but the truth confronts. The truth deals with the reality of what we are on the inside, so we can have a revolution on the inside to change who we are, so that everybody sees it on the outside.

Then you come to Acts chapter three, and verses 13 through 15, Peter is preaching once again, and this happens after the lame man was healed. Now, in that story of the lame man being healed, I think there's just a tremendous account that's there.

So here you have this man that is lame, and he's in the gate, beautiful, begging for money, and the apostles come by, and it says that he looked at him. So he looked at Peter and John, didn't know who they were, looked at them, hoping to get some money from them.

And guess what? They didn't have any. I mean, you know, I don't want to get off on it, but I thoroughly and completely despise the prosperity gospel, because it's another gospel than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Peter says, silver and gold, we don't have. We don't have a Learjet. We don't have a mansion worth millions of dollars. We don't have all these exotic cars. We don't have any of it. We don't even have any change in our pocket to give you.

But what I really have, I'll give you. And what did he have? He had the real thing. He had the goods. He had the power of God operating in his life. That's what God wants. He wants that reality in us.

It's not about how much money we have or what we make. It's about the reality of this God being so real and alive in us that it begins to affect everyone in our life. And even to the point that you could have such miracles like that take place, because God is still doing those kinds of miracles.

And you can say he doesn't, but you cannot deny the reality of the fact of it. I have been divinely healed. I have seen people and person after person after person divinely healed. So you can say all you want, divine healing doesn't exist, but you're like an ostrich sticking your head in the ground.

The reality is God is still alive and still doing what God does. And that's what he said he'd do through the church. And so what did he do? Okay, let's listen to his message here. He goes and preaches to the people now that gather around because of this great healing.

He said, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go.

You disowned the holy and righteous one and asked that a murder be released to you. You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. You see, we'll never see how great a gift salvation is until we see how absolutely utterly evil our sin is.

You don't have a little problem. You have a nightmare. Do you understand? You don't have a little sin issue in your life. You have this horrendous evil inside of you. You have this thing that is so utterly hostile to God that it will damn you to hell forever.

You don't have a little problem. You have this issue that is so horrendous that you will become the plaything of devils and Satan himself for all eternity if you don't deal with the ugly reality of your sin.

And if you don't come to the place and say, God, I'm such a filthy sinner, save me, rescue me, and then by faith, believe, and grab hold of the promise of God and the revolution that comes through that.

You see, it has to come that way. That's the only way it comes. And what was the response? It tells us in verses 19 and 20, he said, repent then and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, that times are refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ who has been appointed for you, even Jesus.

So what happens? There's this thing inside of them. What must I do to be saved? What must I do to be saved? What is it? I see I'm in sins. How do I find a way of escape? How do I get out of this dilemma?

And you know what? God will always show us a way of escape, and it's always gonna be the same identical thing. It's gonna be Jesus. Always gonna be him. There's no one else that can save you. There's no one else that can rescue you.

Your good works, your doctrine, all the other stuff that's there, none of it's gonna save you. There's only one Savior. And then you go to Acts chapter four in verse 12. Peter's now standing before the Sanhedrin.

This is their first real bout of persecution. I'm not sure what timeframe here, whether it's months or maybe a year or two or whatever's the timeframe. It's not that exact, but it's not that long after the events of Jesus ascending into heaven.

And so here he is being persecuted by the very same people that had Jesus executed. You understand? The same identical people, the same men. And they could've, if they wanted to, if they would've been allowed to, I believe God held them back because of the need of these two men in the early church.

But these men could've had Peter and John executed. What does he do? I mean, it's just great. I mean, try and imagine this. Before the people that cried to have Jesus crucified, he stands before them and he says, salvation is found in no one else for there's no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.

I guarantee you the high priest and all the other priests of the Sanhedrin and all the other Pharisees that were there, their mouths were gaping open in utter astonishment. And here's a man that they said, we perceive you've been with Jesus.

Why? Because the mark of Christ's character was upon them. You understand the Holy Spirit was operating through them like it was operating through Jesus. They saw. I mean, we have so many churches out there.

Can you tell really the difference between them and a Mormon temple? Between Kingdom Hall, can you tell any difference? Oh, sure, their songs might be a little bit different. But can you tell anything different?

I don't wanna say the church, but it's a church that every year puts on this big spectacular Christmas pageant. And they have live animals and camels and lions in it and everything else. I mean, it costs them, I found out it costs them over $40 ,000 to put on this production.

And I was invited to go because I happened to be in the area and I didn't want to go, but I felt obligated to go. So I went, Jesse and I went and guess what? They brought a Mormon couple. When it was all done, when all the great show was done, you know what the Mormon man said?

I asked him, what do you think of it? He says, nice show. If I was that pastor of that church, I would have been on my face agonizing in repentance saying, God, that I have a nice show. This wasn't a nice show.

This was a Holy Ghost encounter, bringing to them the reality of their sin and their desperate need of a savior. But what do we do? We put on nice shows and leave the world just as what it was, thinking that they're okay.

And then you have Stephen. Here's Stephen, he was not an apostle, but signs and wonders were taking place through him. People were being healed. He had the testimony that he was a man that was full of faith, full of the Holy Ghost, full of wisdom, full of power and full of grace.

He was a man that the power was working through because he was a man that lived a life that God couldn't trust such power with. Here he is, two chapters in the book of Acts is on this man. Of course, it was because partially because he was the first martyr of the church, but also because Paul in chapter eight, verse one, Paul was watching.

And I guarantee you what took place there was part of what helped Paul come to salvation. And so here you have Stephen now preaching. And here's the wonderful, lovely, beautiful message he's preaching.

You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears, you are just like your fathers. You always resist the Holy Spirit. Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the righteous one.

And now you have betrayed and murdered him. You who have received the law that was put into effect through angels, but have not obeyed it. But they didn't like that message, did they? Mm-mm. It says, when they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him, and they drug him outside Jerusalem and stoned him to death.

You see, the message is gonna come, and we're gonna have to make that decision. Are we gonna bow? Are we gonna throw ourselves at his feet? Are we gonna cry for mercy? Plead with him for the forgiveness that he wants to give, but he wants us to come to the place that we really want it?

He doesn't want lip service, and he knows the difference. He knows the difference. He knows when we're lying, when we're trying to manipulate, because that's what happens. I mean, you get in your sin, and the deeper you get in your sin, the more you're a manipulator.

You have manipulated your families. You've manipulated your wife or children. You've tried to lie your way out of the sin that you practice, and you can't pull that on God. You can't pull it. You may even pull it over on your counselor, but you can't do that over God.

He knows the hearts of men. He knows where we really are. And when you go to Paul, and I'm not gonna take the time to do that, but when you go to Paul, Paul preached the cross as well. When he preached to those who were Gentiles, non-Jews, he came at it from this approach, but he still preached the cross, still brought them to the same identical place, still revealed to them the reality of their sin in need of a savior.

Now, the next thing I wanna point out, I'm not gonna dwell on this. I'm gonna take a few minutes on it, but it's important. It's part of the story. We can't get away from it, and this may go against some of your doctrine.

I'm sorry, but not sorry. You see, Pentecost was normal for the early church. It was normal. You know what we've done today? We've made it abnormal. We've made it rare, or we've done something else. We've made it weird.

It's neither. We see what it's meant to be. We see the purpose of this, that is to bring the reality who this God is to us. And you can be one that is against experience. I'll tell you what, I love to experience God.

I love to experience him. I love his joy, his presence, his conviction. I love it when he convicts me, and I'm on my face weeping before him. I love it. I love it when I'm absolutely overwhelmed, and I have been in the presence of God in some ways that I have been overwhelmed, almost terrified to look up, because you know this holy God has become so near, and God is omnipotent, so his nearness is not the aspect of him being near as if he was far away.

There's no place you can go from God and be closer to him than what you are right now. The difference is it's the reality that he begins to manifest his presence. We begin to see it, perceive it, comprehend his presence, and that is a greater gift than you can understand.

We're not to live by experience, but I'll tell you what. It is wonderful to experience the faith. It's wonderful. John the Baptist prophesied about it. John the Baptist was the last Old Testament prophet.

He was of the Old Testament. He died before Christ was crucified, and so he's the last prophet of the Old Testament, and he tells us in Matthew chapter three, verse 11, "'I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, "'but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, "'whose shoes I am not worthy to bear.

"'He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.'". The prophecy, I mean, there was many of them, but here it is being prepared. This Jesus is gonna come and he's gonna do something. He's gonna do something in the church that has never been done in history before.

It will be unique. Why? Because we cannot do the work God wants us to do without the work of the Holy Spirit, and you know what? We have become very, very, very skilled at doing church without God. Why do you think with the late Oseans, Jesus stands at the door and knock?

Because he's no longer welcomed in. He could kick the door down. He could, like what he did to the apostles in one of the encounters when he showed himself after his resurrection, just all of a sudden, bam, there he is, and then he's gone.