Equipping the Church — Neil T. Anderson

Probably no one in the country right now whose ministry has been more effective in reaching more people with the truth about their identities in Christ, the reality of the battle with Satan and our victory over that battle than Dr. Neal Anderson.

And we are so privileged and pleased to have Neal with us today.

Ah, good morning. So it's fun to come back here amongst friends. We are, aren't we? I was so jealous over Erwin last night, you know, being able to mimic Billy Graham. All I can do is Ross Perot. And my third party ain't doing very well right now.

If I start being kind to those babies, will you right wingers support me? Well, anyway. Get rid of all the worst first. And I was asked to share a little about what we've experienced in Africa. And I just got off the phone Wednesday morning with Joe Wasman, who's part of our ministry.

Reconciliation and Christian Leadership in Liberia

Last August, we got a rather emergency telephone call asking us to come over to Liberia. And Liberia would be almost next to Rwanda in terms of atrocities that have gone on the last ten years or so. And it's a remarkable thing because when a lot of the slaves were brought back to Africa, that's where they were brought.

Eighty percent of the nation is English speaking. That's their national language. And it's probably been historically one of the strongest Christian countries in West Africa anyhow. And back in 1982, there was a coup.

And bloodshed has been going on. Tribal warfare ever since. Elwha's Christian radio station, Sudan Interior Mission, was destroyed I think in 91, something like that. It has just been an atrocity. The worst of it is that by and large, it's Christians killing Christians.

And that was somewhat true in Rwanda in a lot of ways from what I understand. But anyway, it got to the point where they just said politically, we can't solve our problems. We need to turn to the church.

Could you imagine Clinton and Dole saying, we can't solve our problems. We need to turn to the church. I mean, you know, it has to get pretty desperate. And it was desperate. If there was one key person in this thing, the president that was exiled in 82, her daughter, fled the country.

She saw her own father killed in front of her as well as her brother and fled the country and is now back. There she became a Christian and came back with a message of repentance and reconciliation. When the door opened up for the possibility that the country itself politically was turning to the church to ask for some help, who was dealing with corporate problems like this?

And she was familiar with our ministry as well as other mission groups there. So they called and asked if we would come over. Well, I knew I wasn't the one. Frankly, I was on vacation. That's not the real reason.

I mean, if God called, I would go anywhere. But I've never been to Africa. And Joe and Kathy had been and I said no. Joe and Kathy are the ones to go. Had just come on loan with us from Evangelical Free Church.

Had been part of their foreign mission society. You could write a book on what happened next. Of how the skid was graced for them to go over. Her passport had expired. Our country stepped in. Gave them both a visa.

Met them at the airport. Bumped them up to first class. Got them over there. Trained some key national leaders on personal as well as corporate freedom. And then met with 120 political leaders, educational, military, and tribal leaders.

Led them to personal freedom and then corporately. It has set off a spark that just kind of boggles my mind. It's almost, what do we do God? And Joe just got back from five weeks over there. Just a crash tour through several countries.

Equipping leaders like this. And we're going to send a team back next summer. I'm going myself next year. I'm really looking forward to that. There's a movement going on around the world. A little over a year ago I was in India.

And they had a major, what they call a cons conference. It was a conference on basically reaching India for Christ in our lifetime. And the message, again, was unity. And other than Dick Eastman's one time, I was the only white guy there.

And it was just in timing with us starting our own office there. And realizing that whether you're dealing with the caste system there or the breaking up of Czechoslovakia into two countries, Yugoslavia into how many, we don't know yet.

And all of the tribal identities that we have around the world, the only answer is that we've got to establish our people free in Christ because then and only then can we really come together. I've been asked to address this morning equipping the church.

And I'm going to do that somewhat by way of testimony. And start from where I began and bring you forward on that issue. That what we're doing here is not a game. It's the most serious, sobering work of the world.

Spiritual Conflict, Deliverance, and the Reality of Opposition

The greatest turning point in my own personal life goes back to the nearest tragedy of our life. I started a class at Talbot. We'd never offered anything like this before. I eventually called it spiritual conflicts and counseling.

I've learned in our culture to stay away from certain loaded terms. Deliverance is a great term, folks. Salvation is deliverance. You've been delivered out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's beloved Son.

But you say you have a deliverance ministry here, you are going to immediately eliminate 75 of your population around you because they've got to stereotype what that means. So we stay with spiritual conflicts, for instance.

And I went to Singapore, which is the opposite. Conflict is a negative term here. Can we use deliverance? Well, fine. That's just learning language skills. That's being all things to all people and adapting yourself to the culture where you're at and realize there are certain terms that carry loaded weight with them for people's minds.

If we could take the word demon possession and eliminate it from our vocabulary, we'd all go, praise God. Now we can get beyond that one and every stereotype that goes with that. So, Fred, you're probably nodding your head too, yes.

Can we think of a new word? Anyway, you're immediately either overwhelmingly accepted or rejected just on terms. You don't even know what you're talking about, for instance. It's a tragedy, but we have to soberly realize that.

Well, anyway, I was teaching this class, and you've heard this before. It was a little bit of a phenomena for a seminary, THM level class. We started with 18, 23, 35, 65, 150, 250. For seminary, that's a little bit of a phenomena.

In those days, I think I was graduating from kindergarten to first grade to second grade, and I think I'm in third grade now. But I always tell people, what I don't know is absolutely profound. There are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many things that I don't know, none of which I'm going to talk about for the next hour.

And I can only share with you what I do know. But we went through it as a family. Painful stuff. You know, I've never shared all of it because some of it is personal. My daughter was raped, for instance.

It seemed like every time I would give that class in the spring, looking back now, if only I had known the tremendous teaching on the end of Ephesians, pray it all the time in the spirit, pray specifically for me, that I may have the courage to speak the word of God with boldness.

And Paul is saying, I'm out here in the front line, and without being ashamed about it, pray specifically for me. And knowing enough to have committed prayer support. You see, I probably have been a little bit like the sailor who said, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

And my wife's whole ministry is she prays that they all miss. See, and I have all those torpedoes. And I realize, you're out on the front line, you are a target. The more that you do to help people, frankly, the more opposition you get.

Which causes a lot of people to say, I'm going to back off and not do that anymore. And you've got to fight through that temptation, because there's going to be one for everybody here. The moment you set a few people free in Christ, you're going to create a stir.

Some who want help, and some who want to discredit you. And it's going to happen across the line. It's always been true, always will be true. Well, I'll live a perfect life. Oh, wonderful. There was only one who did, and they crucified him.

And, you know, so, you know, it won't hurt you if all men speak well of you. And that's, I'd like everybody to speak well of me. I'd like to be a friend to everybody. But I'm not going to try that at the expense of speaking the truth in love.

And there's a price to pay with that. Well, anyway, that was a painful thing with my daughter. I can't tell you what it's like to be the chairman of a theology department, practical theology department, moonlighting in a church with the title Minister of Family Life and show up with a daughter who's pregnant, all of that.

And I've got a granddaughter out there someday. And we chose the best thing to do was to dop it out at that time and let Heidi reestablish and confirm it. Let me tell you something, as tragic as that is, there's life after that.

There was two boys who drug her into a party at school. Remember that plane collision over Los Angeles? Those two planes collided several years ago. One of those boys was on that plane. The other one came and asked us for forgiveness, of which we did.

When I gave my daughter away, it was the most emotional experience of my life. And Mama was right there because I gave her away to the most wonderful Christian man that you could ever hope. If I could pick, hand pick, I couldn't have done a better job.

And I realized that God made that right. And in our own family, my little daughter who wanted to stay a virgin until she got married, her temple was violated. Well, that was hard. There was actually a harder one for us.

Suffering, Depression, and Learning Compassion

It was next year. My wife had developed cataracts. And this happened quite a few years earlier and was really my motivation to get my wife out of the senior pastoral role. There's enough pressure in ministry in and of itself but I told Joanne at that time, and I love pastoring.

I mean, I think a lot of ways, if I could, I would do that right now. As much as my heart is, I don't feel I'm a counselor, I feel I'm a pastor. But I realized for the sake of my wife or mental health, I had to get her out of that role.

That was my primary, almost only reason at that time, I think, that God used to guide me to get my first doctorate. And I didn't know what God wanted me to do. I had no idea at the time. I ended up being a seminary prof.

At those days, they wouldn't do lens implants. So they let each eye cloud up and eventually they clouded over and they would remove the lens and then she would be adjusted first with the Coke bottle glasses and then finally contact lenses.

And anyway, about six years after that, her doctor suggested that she have another, have an implant. And at that time, they would do that. And so I was excited about that. I said, I think that will be great.

So she went in and had a lens implant. And it triggered off 15 months of the darkest period of my life. What was interesting about it is that my ministry was going like this and my family was going like this.

The surgery was successful. There was nothing wrong with that. But it triggered off something that defied explanation. Doctors couldn't find anything wrong. She got sleep deprived and majorly depressed.

Something I've personally never shared publicly before, but I want you to know how bad it can get. Because it was bad anyhow. And it's always the darkest before the dawn. My wife really couldn't function as a wife or as a mother.

She was at a time where it could be a midlife thing. They explored that. That wasn't it. Major depression. She fought going on any kind of antidepressants. But finally she did. And she didn't want to take any kind of pills.

But she did for about 2 months. And then I took my son to a soccer game on a Saturday morning. I came back. There was a note on the door. I'm over at Whittier Presbyterian Hospital. I've checked myself into the chemical dependency unit.

I've never had anything hit me like that in my life. What? And it turned out it was a friend in church who was chemically dependent on prescription drugs. She was married to a doctor. It was just a sad, sick thing.

And Joanne was not chemically dependent. I mean it was the furthest thing from it. Her medication wasn't even that high. 2 months on antidepressants is not going to make you chemically dependent, folks.

And I mean it's absurd. Well, I raced over there right away, but I couldn't see her because they have a 2 days where you can't see it. They're in, quote, detox. And so I couldn't even talk to the administrator.

I said, to put this in perspective, our cost up at that time, it caused us to sell our house. And so we had absolutely nothing. I had no money at all. I said, how could she do this? I don't have any insurance.

I don't have any money. I found out on a Monday that she took our MasterCard and committed herself to $3 ,600. I'm a seminary prof, folks. Do you know what we make as a seminary prof? I mean, it would take years to repay that.

And I said, and here I'm back in the hole again, and I got no house to sell. And I said, my wife is not chemically dependent. Well, you're in denial. In order to support my wife, I had to sit there for 2 weeks in a group and say, I'm a co-addict, co-dependent.

I had to say that for 2 weeks. And finally my wife realized what a joke this is. And if you want to add a little insult to injury here, everybody on that staff, from administrators down, were all homosexual.

I mean, it doesn't get any lower than this, folks. I didn't know whether my wife was going to live or die. Neither did my daughter. And it scared her, so she kind of stayed away. My son got very, very quiet.

He had a wonderful relationship with his mother. And Carl just got quiet. At that time, Carl was, frankly, some kind of an athlete. He made, in a large school, starting left wing varsity soccer in his 9th grade and never played competitive sports again, which, frankly, is fine with me.

And my conflict of role at that time, I've never felt so sensitive to something. I said, am I my wife's counselor? Am I her pastor? And I realized if I was that, I couldn't be her husband. And I had to commit myself to just be her husband.

My role was to hang on every day and say, this too shall pass. In Isaiah 21, there's a passage that says, Washman, how far gone the night? Washman, how far gone the night? Washman says, morning comes.

Oh, hang on to that, folks. If I didn't believe that today, I wouldn't be here today. Morning comes. This too will pass. Even if it's death, folks, you're going to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

If I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have any sense of hope. That's all I'm dealing with here. And if God had any kind of a sense of humor, here I am, chairman of the practical theology department.

The man who taught our pastoral counseling resigned that year, and the dean himself asked if I would switch over. And I said, great. I've got a wife I can't fix. And I thought this would go on maybe for a week or a month.

It went on for 15 months. During that time, we lost everything we had. God stripped us down to absolutely nothing. It's a fascinating experience to find yourself in a place like that because I come from kind of a stoic, self-sufficient, Norwegian farm background that had a tendency now and then to raise its ugly head and say, well, what's wrong with you anyhow?

Do a few push-ups. Read your Bible. All that got mercifully stripped out. I had a few Job's friends show up to help me out. One person actually suggested that I was not loving my wife, and that's the reason I said, boy, I mean, watch your words when somebody's going through a trial like that.

I'm telling you, it's really fascinating. I've never been there before. I'd always been on the giving side. Suddenly I found myself with something I could not fix. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I prayed, there seemed to be absolutely no answer at all.

It was silence from heaven. Looking back, there was one person who stood pillars above everybody else in helping me during that time. It was old Nick Kertanic. Nick's probably 72 years old now. He's a Bible teacher, been for years at Biola, at his office right beside mine.

Nick's just a dear soul. Let me tell you why Nick was qualified. Fifteen years prior to that, he was two weeks away from death with melanoma. They did a radical mastectomy, and for whatever reason, God spared his life and healed him.

Just a dear soul. You say, what did he do? Oh, he stopped by my office once a week, just walk in, any change? I said, no. Then I pray. That's all he did. And I can tell you, folks, that meant more to me than any word of advice.

The advice was nothing at that time. I don't care what you told me. I knew all the advice. There was nothing you could tell me that I wasn't willing to do. But I couldn't do anything. Couldn't fix it.

And it's always the darkest before the dawn. Well, we had a day of prayer on campus. Had nothing to do with it, actually, other than participating. And on Wednesday evening, the undergraduate students go down to sit on the gym floor and have communion.

And I just went and sat with them. I was late on campus, so I just sat there. If God ever spoke to me, he did there. No voices, no visions, nothing like that. Wasn't anything anybody said, to be honest with you.

But the way that God just kind of funnels your thoughts. It went something like this. Neil, there's a price to pay for freedom. It cost my son his life. Are you willing to pay the price? I said, well, Lord, if that's the reason I'm willing, if it's some stupid thing I'm doing, then I'm not.

But I want you to know something. I left there that night, and I knew it was over. I knew it was over. And it was. Within a week, my wife woke up one morning. She said, I slept last night. Never looked back.

Never looked back. You say, why? Why did you have to go through that? Well, one, I already suggested. I think he took away my cliche answers and simplistic fixes. I think that was a smaller one. I don't think I'd ever been too much into that anyhow.

But another big one for me personally was just the whole sense of compassion. When the Lord says, go and learn what this means, I desire compassion, not sacrifice. If there is one essential prerequisite to helping the hurting people, that's it, folks.

Compassion. You learn to weep with those who weep. There are times when you just got to hold on to somebody, and that's all you can do is just hold on. And boy, I want you to know something. That speaks volumes in and of itself.

So compassion, I think, was a big one for me. I mean, I think most of us who are helping people on a regular basis like that are about that far away from tears all the time. I mean, I am. It doesn't take much to set me off anymore.

I mean, the stuff that you hear is just incredible. You know, I went through a period, I want to hear this. And frankly, I don't think I could if I didn't see the resolution. I don't think I could. I don't see how these people sit in these hospitals and see no resolution and hear these incredible atrocities.

Frankly, they just get hard. They get numb after a while. And I just pray, I don't want my heart to get hard. I don't want it to get numb. You know, I want to stay sensitive to the needs of our people in this world.

I think from God's perspective, the biggest part of it was this. I think what God very skillfully did is he brought Neil Anderson to the end of his resources. That's the greatest day of my life. Frankly, only then do you really discover God's.

As long as you think you can set a person free, God will just let you go ahead and try it. Then one day you realize you can't do that, can you? You can't do that. It's impossible for you and I to do that.

I'm not sharing this with you to solicit some kind of sympathy for me whatsoever. Don't you feel sorry for me, folks. That was the birth of Freedom in Christ Ministries. Everything after that changed for me.

You know, my mind wasn't any different. My capacity to think didn't change at all. And I had a nice little ministry going on, I think, at the school before that. But everything changed. I did switch over and teach pastoral counseling.

I never would have done that apart from that crisis. I'm a disciple. That's where my heart is at. If you would have asked me five years prior to that, would I ever be teaching pastoral counseling, I'd say, no, I don't think so.

If you had asked after that happened if I'd ever write a book, I'd have said, no, I don't think so. It's the grace of God. A guy in Canada asked me, he says, what's automatic writing? I said, I think it's what I do.

It's not. What was born out of that, really honestly, was victory over the darkness and bondage breaker. I never had any intention to leave seminary. I enjoyed teaching. I thought I had an assignment for life.

It was comfortable. It was... Then I really realized God, a few years ago, released me. He said, you need to go to the churches. And I didn't want to do that. Honestly, in a lot of ways. Because, frankly, I didn't want the fight.

I wasn't afraid of the demons. It was... You know. I remember sitting in a faculty prayer time. We had our faculty retreat. And Bing Hunter, who then became dean, and now he's dean at Trinity. He heard me pray this prayer.

I said, I got a prayer request. I said, I know I need to write a book. I said, frankly, I don't want to. I'm not afraid of the spiritual battle. I've worked through that in my own personal life. I mean, God took me through the dredges.

I just didn't want to deal with all the academia that we like to think higher education is truly liberal arts. And there's nothing but open-minded people here with new world views and suggestions. I said, frankly, it's the most entrenched portion of our society.

And I don't know how to overcome that, to be honest with you. But it's true. The higher you go, the more committed you are to your perspective. And after all, mine's right. And boy, I tell you, what we've got to be drug through to change our world view sometimes is rather profound.

Freedom in Christ and the Priority of Reconciliation with God

Well, anyway, so it's kind of fascinating what came out of that. Most of you are familiar with those two books and what our thoughts are here. The real issue to me is not near so much getting a person free of a demon but to get them right with God.

That has been my core belief from day one. And realize the primary issue here in James 4 -7, which is probably a summary of my ministry, the real issue is to submit to God. That's the real issue. And then resist the devil.

And I made a life commitment, a two-fold thing. One is to show how Christ really is the answer and how truth will set us free. I mean, that's my primary focus. I want to see Christ come back in the center of my life, of my marriage, my family, my ministry.

He is the hub. And everything else is spokes to that. It's as simple as this, that he came to give us life, that we're to abide in Christ. We're not called to bear fruit. Do you realize that? We're called to abide in Christ.

If you abide in Christ, you will bear fruit. And to get Christ back in the center of our lives and of our ministries, not for that just as an end in itself, but until our people and our marriages and our families are free.

Only then can we collectively come together in unity and reach this world for Christ. And so as much as my heart is committed to world evangelization, I have to say it's probably going to be stymied to the degree that we don't have Christ in the center of our lives.

And so anyway, I feel I'm, this year, kind of on the end of a long, long journey, which isn't ended in one sense, but let me explain that, of completing a whole training package for our churches that would catch the vision.

Think about this for a moment. What if you pick, very carefully, 20 people, train them for about a few months. Those 20 people would commit themselves to help one person every other week. That's not overwhelming, is it?

I mean, most people would be willing to say, sure, I'll meet with somebody every other week. Do you realize in one year's time, that's 520 people you've helped? You know, the multiplication process is rather fascinating to me.

Let's say a few of those turned around and helped a few others. It didn't take a mathematician to realize that if every church in America did that, you'd see something rather phenomenal happen. That all could happen in the next two years.

You know what the limit is? Leadership. You know, you get so frustrated with some pastors, just get out of the way and give permission then. You know, you got all kinds of people out here who desperately want to hear this, and maybe because you have your own pride, or feeling inadequate yourself, but, you know, I love pastors.

I'm out here to destroy pastors. My heart bleeds for the church. I think God's avenue of working in our world today is through the church. I'm committed to that. I'm not going to bypass it. I've been tempted out of my socks to do all kinds of other things to replace it, but I'm not going to do that.

Because I think that God has committed himself today to work through that local church. You know, we say evangelism, what ministry comes to your mind? Honestly. Campus Crusade, right? Say discipleship, what comes to your mind?

My life commitment is, I say both, local church should come to your mind. That's our function, isn't it? To establish our people free in Christ and start having them multiply themselves in that community.

My workshop this afternoon, I'm going to let a couple from Crystal Evangelical Free Church share with you what's going on up there. They have their own conference. Their workbook's right back here. We did our conference here a little over 2 1⁄2 years ago.

In that time, they have led 1 ,200 people to freedom in Christ. 1 ,200. 95 of that's done by lay people. Well, catch the vision. That has to happen. We can't send them all to Fred Dickinson. You like that?

I know you do. We can't do that. Don't send them all to me either. I'm not the answer. Christ is the answer. I'm not the deliverer. That's the Lord. And if we don't see the scriptural mandate to equip the saints to do the work of ministry, it's not going to get done.

There's not enough professionals in this country to reach more than 5 of our population if that's all they did. You've got to catch this vision, folks. And believe you me, you've got all kinds of people in your church.

It's like going back to poor old Moses. Where am I going to get meat to eat? You know? If you're a pastor, you'll be there saying, I'm not getting fed around here. Where am I going to get meat to eat?

You know? And God says, I want you to choose 70 elders who you know you can put in charge of this task. They were already there. He just didn't catch the vision. There's 70 others out there. Equip them, turn them loose.

You need some help. And you try to do this by yourself, you'll kill yourself. I've isolated myself so bad right now. Just so I can have a family life, it's unbelievable. I said, I'm not the answer. I'm not going to start a counseling place someplace.

That's not the answer. The answer is the church. We've got to equip an army here. That's what we have to do. So anyway, if you turn to Pains 12, I'm trying to avoid a commentary from my ministry here, but I want to tell you the things that I've had to wrestle with.

If you can find a better book to cover that portion of it, God bless you, use that one. I always tell people who complain about my ministry, I say, what are you doing to help folks? And if it's what you're doing is more theologically accurate and bear more fruit than mine, I'll tell you what I'll do, brother.

I will say, God bless you, get behind you, support you, and go back to T Seminary again. And until then, I'm not even going to say it. You know, what we've tried to do is the best we can. We've got visually oriented people today to provide tapes, whatever, you know, that we can have.

Living Free in Christ and Christian Identity

And you can read this thing here, but everything was seemingly born out of necessity. You know, we'd help people find a person and get them free in Christ and realize their whole mind had to be programmed again.

And so we hand them the book now, Living Free in Christ, and help them show how Christ can meet the most critical needs of their life, to establish their identity where it belongs, to work with God, folks.

It's the Holy Spirit bearing witness with my spirit that I'm a child of God. Here's 36 days, little lessons. Sit down, renew your mind, program it again to who you really are as a child of God. Because the one common denominator I found of everybody embodied to us, none of them knew who they were in Christ.

Why? Why not? Where's the Abba Father? This is not an aberration in Scripture. This is the core to present you complete how? In Christ. Now that's the most repeated prepositional phrase in the New Testament.

And I realize how many people have been hurt in that way. I was... I got a point in there that I had to write, call my son and say, can I use this as an illustration since it involves you, Carl? And he said, sure, Dad.

And I was about all choked up crying as I was thinking about it. But when I moved to seminary from the pastorate, Carl really was known as an athlete. I mean, we'd have soccer teams, baseball teams call and ask me if I'd be the coach.

They didn't want me, they wanted my son. It was embarrassing. And... So you know if they got me as a coach, they automatically got my son. And so anyway, when I left that area, five years in the same area, same coaches, teams, whatever, it was a very difficult move for Carl.

It really was. Leaving that behind and frankly his reputation preceded him. And we got over there and a club soccer team called and asked if Carl would like to be on the team and checked it out. Good coach.

So that's where we went for the next seven years. But anyway, first practice, Carl was playing with reckless abandon folks. He's tearing up the turf out there. I'm kind of going, oh man, coach is drooling.

Boy, I'm going to use Carl here and I'm going to use him there. And end of the practice, everybody leaves and Carl comes up to me and I could just see the insecurity in his face. I said, Carl, what's wrong?

He said, well, am I on the team or aren't I? I said, Carl, you're on the team. The roster's already been set. Where you play is up to the coach. How well you play is up to you. Dear Christian, you're on the team.

The roster's already set. Where you play is up to the coach. How well you play is up to you. I can't tell you how many gifted, mature Christian leaders have pulled me aside and said, you just described me tonight.

And you'd go, you? With your giftedness and your talents? How could you feel that way? Let me take a shot at it, folks. Somewhere, maybe, in the recesses of their mind, maybe they begin to think, maybe I'm here because of my gifts and my talents.

Maybe if I don't perform, maybe God's going to cut me someday from the squad here. And then I find somebody on the end of the bench and you'd have to be pretty sharp to figure out what their gift and their talent is.

It's there, but it's not overwhelming. You know what I mean? And they're thrilled to death to be a member of the team because they know they're not there because of their gifts and their talents. But neither are you and I.

We all are what we are by the gifts of God. He hasn't equally distributed gifts, talents, nor intelligence. He hasn't done that. What is equally distributed is himself. And the only legitimate basis for our sense of unity coming together as the body of Christ to establish a legitimate sense of self and identity can only be found right in there.

Beloved, now you are a child of God. What would you rather do? Be that or rock a scientist? Well, I can see why you'd like to be both. The point of it is is that one thing we can all be. The great equalizer is is that we're all children of God.

And all he's going to do is ask us to be accountable with what he's given to us. And he hasn't distributed that equally. And the only joy you're going to find is using what he gave you. And doing it to the glory of God.

Walking by the Holy Spirit and Renewing the Mind

Well, anyway, the next consequence that came out of this thing obviously was if people are paying attention to deceiving spirits then how are you led by the Holy Spirit? You know, if I could take my ministry and do it for only one purpose only it would be free people up so they could be led by the Holy Spirit.