Are Christians Ready to Govern the Nations?

The word of God—God still has things to say to us. Let us go to the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 10, beginning with verse 1. But before we enter into that passage, let me say something for the brothers and sisters who are visiting us, those who have not been here before, or those who were absent. These sermons are part of a series I am preaching on the subject of authority; at least four or five of you here probably remember.

The subject of authority. This is part of a series that we began with the first sermon, in which I spoke about obedience, and then we moved into the subject of authority because one thing sort of led to the other. Because these subjects are connected. And I was saying that I feel the Lord has first spoken to my own life.

When I began this series, I really did not even know what I was getting into, and I simply obeyed an initial thought that God placed in my heart concerning obedience. And as you remember, I spoke about obedience to the Lord, obedience to the Father, and about how obedience is better than sacrifices. Those sermons, by the way, are on the website, on the Internet page, if you would like to look them up and thus get an idea of the entire journey we have taken.

Obedience to the Father is also connected to obedience to human authorities. One thing is connected to the other. And so, logically, I felt compelled to continue with the subject of authority. And in this process of sharing with you and meditating on that subject, an entire panorama of reflection has opened up to me concerning an area that I believe is of absolute importance to the people of God in this time in which we are living. Because my impression—and not only mine, but that of many of us who observe the movement of the church of Jesus Christ in this time, and who meditate on what God wants to do with the church in these coming years and perhaps decades, depending on how long the Lord takes to come—is that all of it depends greatly on the church aligning itself, synchronizing itself with the word of God, synchronizing itself.

I am going to use that word very deliberately, and when I say the word, a comparison comes to mind that may illustrate this. Not long ago I entered—I took one more step into the world of technology—and I was reminded of it by the little device we are using during Promise Week, with the iPods; I do not know whether what we are using is an iPod. I had resisted iPods for a long time, and finally Sonia, our eldest daughter, gave us an iPod, and I began learning how to use it, and so on. I am happy with my little iPod. The only thing is that you are not going to see me out there running around with one of those little devices in my ears or anything like that, but what it can do is very interesting.

And one of the things you do with an iPod—let us say you record music on your computer. The music goes onto your computer and is stored there on the computer, and the computer assigns titles to each song it is storing. Then you take your little device, the iPod, plug it into the computer, and the computer asks you, “Do you want to synchronize”—that is the word—“what is on the computer with the little device?” The little device is simply a device for storing information—in this case, music. So it says to you, “Do you want to match the musical content that is in me, the computer, with the little device you are connecting?” Then I tell it yes and press the little button that says “sync.” Then the computer does its strange things there, which I am not going to start thinking about, but mysteriously, magically, wonderfully, the music downloads to the little device, and I connect a speaker to it, or whatever, and I can hear on the little device exactly what was on my computer. Why? Because it was synchronized. In other words, the little device was brought into alignment with the content that was on the computer.

And brothers and sisters, I believe that is what God wants to do with each one of us and with His church in this time. What is the computer? The word of God, the Holy Spirit. And God wants you and me, and especially the church in general, to match, synchronize, and align ourselves with the heart of God, with the mind of God, with the content of the word of God, so that the way God thinks, feels, reasons, acts—His way of seeing the world—may pass into your heart and your mind, and so that you can then synchronize the content of God’s heart with the content that is in your heart. Do you understand? We will never do it completely, but I do believe that we can match up. I believe that right now the church of Jesus Christ is completely out of alignment.

Interestingly, something happened to me—something else that can illustrate this a little more; I am already into the content of the message. Miguel, my son-in-law—I saw some songs on his iPod that I wanted to have on mine. You know what? He is hipper, more modern, and he had content that I, being way behind in that area, did not have. I said, “Wow, I want this one, and I want this one, and I want that other one, and I want that entire CD.” There was a very good jazz one there that I will recommend to you later—all holy, do not worry. The thing was that you are not supposed to—I mean, the iPod program is not designed for songs to be downloaded that way. But he told me, “Do not worry. I know of a program that allows the content to be downloaded.” So it was through another program, one that was not the computer’s legitimate program, iTunes.

He used another program to download the content from his computer to my iPod, and that is what he did, and I was happy with my... But what happened? When I later wanted to download other songs from my computer, the computer recognized that my iPod contained content that it had not given me permission to download onto my iPod. And it told me, “There are songs here that are not authorized to be downloaded.” It recognized that the program that had put those songs there was not the same one it had and that Apple, in order to maintain its monopoly, had controlled very well. The point is that this is often what happens.

There are times when there is content in the mind of the church, there is content in the heart of the people of God, that God has not authorized to be downloaded into us. There is content in my mind; there are patterns of governance and attitudes in this church, and behaviors in us, brothers and sisters, ways of thinking and reasoning, which, when God examines us to see whether we are synchronized with Him, cause Him to say, “I did not put that program there. That content is not Mine,” and God rejects it. And every one of us, beginning with the one speaking to you, has content that does not come from the heart of God, and we must remove that content because there can be no intimate and perfect connection with the Spirit of God while that content is within us. The Spirit of God rejects it, and then God’s information cannot pass and flow properly through us.

God’s program cannot be fulfilled and manifested with all the fullness with which it desires to be manifested in our lives. There is much content in the heart of the church, in the church’s program, in the governance of the church, in the teaching of the church, in the church’s evangelistic program, in the church’s discipleship, and in the way leaders behave in the church, that has not come down from the heart of God or from His word, but has come down from the program of culture, the program of the modern mind, the program of the intellect, the program of history—the point in history in which we are living—or from the program of man’s own heart and from carnal reasoning that has nothing whatsoever to do with the worldview, the vision of the world, manifested by the word of God.

And I believe that in this time God’s heart is saying to the church, to humanity, “I need you to align your program with My program, to align your heart with My heart.” Brothers and sisters, I feel in my spirit that God is seeking—God wants reconciliation with His creatures as never before in history. God wants to be reconciled with humanity. Rather, I would say that, in a sense, it is humanity that needs to be reconciled with God, because the Father is always eager and willing. God does not want to destroy His creature. God does not want anyone to perish, but for everyone to proceed to eternal life, the word says.

But you know what? The world has very little time left before God shakes—as God laid it on my heart to read in Hebrews 12 the other day, verses 25 to 27, or to 29—it says, “Once more,” says the Lord, “and I will shake the heavens and the earth.” And I believe that God’s heart is prepared to shake the heavens and the earth at any moment. And God does not want to destroy; God wants to preserve His creature.

Brothers and sisters, God is a Father. Imagine God as a very rich and very powerful man who has millions and millions of dollars at his disposal, and people tremble in his presence. He can pick up the telephone and call any head of state anywhere in the world, and they will connect him with that president. But he has a rebellious son who insists on taking drugs, and every so often they call that father to tell him that his son has been arrested, and he uses his influence to get him out of jail. And he sits down with his son and tries to reason with him and says, “Son, I want to protect you, but you are on the road to destruction.” And that son persists in disobeying his father and living in a self-destructive manner.

And there is something in that son’s heart—a wound, pride, some evil impulse—that leads him into patterns of behavior that are self-destructive. That son is intelligent, that son has great potential, that son has great talents, that son has a calling, that son bears in his flesh the cells and genes of his parent, and he could be almost as great as his father and be just as successful and even do more good than his father here on earth. But that son is determined to live according to his own principles and desires, and that father’s heart grieves and weeps and bleeds because that father says, “Look at me. With all the power I have, if I pick up the telephone, the president of the United States answers me. If I want to send a million dollars to someone, I do it. If I want to buy and sell with my money, I can do it. But I cannot enter my son’s heart and mind and change what is inside him. I cannot take it out of him because I do not have the power, the authority—not the power, but the authority to... I cannot put my hand into his heart, tear it out, and cleanse it. I cannot open his head, find where the problem is in his brain, and bring it into alignment. I cannot go to the seat of his emotions and take a wrench or a hammer or whatever and remove the impurity.

“All my money and all my power are of no use to me in changing my son’s heart, and I can only watch him as he heads toward destruction. And one day I fear they will call me and say, ‘Your son died in a traffic accident,’ or, ‘He took a drug overdose,’ or, ‘They caught him at a nightclub and shot him,’ and I do not have the ability to protect my son from that self-destructive direction he is following.”

And brothers and sisters, that is God’s dilemma in this time concerning humanity. God has absolute power. If He wanted to, He could turn you and me into robots that did exactly what He wants. If He wanted to, He could enter into the midst of history for an instant, take control, take the helm of the universe and the world, change the course of history, and turn this human race into a race completely compelled to obey Him. But He is prevented from doing so by His own justice and His own self-respect. And so He needs man to align himself, man to humble himself, that creature whom He has created to bring itself into synchronization with Him so that He can do what He wants to do. That creature is destined for immense things. God made him a little lower than the angels. In the heart of man, in the genes of the men and women of the human race, there are potentialities that you and I cannot even imagine, but we must synchronize ourselves with the Father.

What I am telling you, I do not know where it came from, because that is not what this is about, but I know… all of that is connected, I assure you. But God is placing something in my heart at this time, brothers and sisters; something is being born within me, and only now am I daring to begin speaking about these things. We are at a crucial time when God is going to begin doing great things in the world; the course of history is going to change, and we are on the edge of a precipice in the positive sense of the word. I believe a time is opening up in God’s dealings with humanity, and I myself am not sure what I am seeing, but I know that it is great. And that is going to mean—and here is the connection—that the church of Jesus Christ, because God wants reconciliation with humanity, because God is going to give humanity one last opportunity—the Father does not want to destroy His creation. Before He brings this to an end and sends His judgment upon the earth, He desperately desires His creature, whom He loves for reasons we could never imagine. Why did God choose to create you and me? Why did God carry out this incredibly artistic experiment of forming with His mouth a piece of earth called the earth, the planet Earth, and planting men and women upon it, as raisins are put into a cake, to walk upon it and look at Him as He looks at Himself? And He placed something of Himself in that creature so that it might look at Him with almost the same lucidity with which He sees Himself, and so that He might converse with that creature throughout century after century and resolve something that you and I cannot imagine: what is in the heart of God in His relationship with this creature called man, woman, humanity.

And God loves His creature as a father loves his children, and that rebellious child wounds the Father’s heart. Sometimes, in this time, I feel the pain in God’s heart over His creature. He wants reconciliation. His heart is broken. He does not want to destroy man, but man needs to align himself with Him, because God is not going to change the way He is; He is high and exalted. The terms of reconciliation between God and man will be according to what God has established, not according to what man wants. Do you understand? God desperately desires to be aligned with His creature, but His creature must align itself with Him. He is not going to change His terms. He wants—He ardently desires it; His heart bleeds for reconciliation. He does not want to destroy, and He is pleading with His creature: Do not make Me destroy you, because I love you. And He does not want anyone to perish. Every one of us is precious to the Father’s heart.

And yet the nations, governments, countries, individuals, and systems stubbornly insist on saying, “No, I want to do things my way.” And the Father’s heart bleeds, bleeds, bleeds. That God—let no one tell me that God is impassible and completely self-sufficient, moving somewhere out there in absolute otherness. No. God feels, brothers and sisters. The God I see in the Bible is a God whose heart bleeds, a God capable of feeling wrath, jealousy, and pain. He is a passionate God.

If you feel passion, it is because God made you in His image and because He is passionate, and that is why you have feelings. And that Father is bleeding for His children and wants to be reconciled with His children. He wants His children to draw near to Him and kiss His hand so that He can say to them, “Come, children; I was waiting.” Like the prodigal son.

Do you see the story of the prodigal son? The son was off there doing his own thing: “Give me my inheritance.” His pride—he fails and comes back. And what happens? As soon as he made the first hint of moving toward his father, what did the father do? He took off the slipper he was wearing; he did not even get dressed. He went out in his bathrobe and ran to meet his son when he saw him in the distance. He embraced him and kissed him. He did not mention what a shameless person he had been, how deeply he had wounded his heart, or the shame he had brought upon the household. The son simply needed to make one gesture of brokenness and draw near, and the father’s heart immediately melted.

And you know what? That is what God wants humanity to do: He wants humanity to look at the centuries of tragedy it has brought upon itself—the terrible wars, the genocides, the premature deaths, the birth defects, the freedom the devil has had to destroy what God loves—and say, “Wow, you know what? I will return to my father. Everything I need is there with my father. Even those who are farthest removed over there with my father eat and drink and rejoice, and look at me here: I am the son, and I am eating carob pods, what the pigs eat.”

And God is waiting for humanity to become aware and say, “Wow”—to come to its senses, because humanity is bewitched, hypnotized by the serpent’s eyes. He is waiting for humanity to come to its senses and say, “You know what? I am going back to my father’s house, and I am going to humble myself before Him.” And you know what? God will not even wait for us to open our mouths. He will feel the heart of His creature turning back to Him and immediately, at the speed of light or faster, He will seek reconciliation and say, “Here I am to bless you.”

But that is what God wants, and I know that it is coming. And this is my point, because I seem unable to move on from it: when that moment comes, God is going to need a church, a church that operates according to His heart so that it may exercise the authority He needs it to exercise over the world. Because let me tell you that in that dispensation—I am going to call it that—which God is opening and preparing to open for humanity, the church, His church, is going to have a very important administrative and governing role to play.

I believe that the church of Jesus Christ in that era, that age God wants to open—and first judgment will come, and then that opening, and I am not sure; I am being a little vague because I do not understand all the chains of events and the relationships of one thing to another—but in that new age that is going to open, the church of Jesus Christ will rule over the nations and will rule over intellectual, governmental, and medical systems, laws, all those things, and culture. The church will have much to say. It will be a true mother church, an apostolic church, a church to which the nations will come to seek the counsel of the Lord’s servants. And if that church is not governing according to the Father’s heart, it will fail the Father; it will not be able to exercise the authority it must exercise in the way God wants the church to exercise authority. And that is why God is saying, “My church, align yourselves with the principles of My Word. I want to restore the guidelines of My Word to the church so that you may then govern in My name and according to the principles of My Word, according to the heart of My Son, so that you do not damage what I have for you and for the world.” Am I making myself clear?

And that is why we must learn these principles of the Word of God: how authority is used legitimately and how one submits to legitimate authority. The church today is not prepared; it is not equipped to exercise the authority God wants to place in its hands. And that is why we spend all our time saying to the Father, “Lord, bring revival. Lord, send Your Son. Lord, restore the government of the church, remove the reproach from our heads, give Your church the authority Your Word promises.” And God says, “But if I give it to you, you are going to make, as we say in good Caribbean fashion, a mess of it; you are going to do something foolish; you are going to ruin the whole thing. I cannot give you authority until you learn to use authority and until you learn to submit to authority.”

I also believe that in the age into which God wants to bring the church, apostolic authority is going to be very important—apostolic authority. That means I believe God wants to restore to the government of the church that kind of eldership: people chosen by Him, anointed by Him, commissioned and equipped by Him, in very deep contact with His heart and His revelation, who exercise authority in His name over the church and over the world. And the church must be able to go to that apostolic authority and receive its directives; that authority must receive revelation from the Father and transmit it to the church so that the church may then carry out the Father’s orders. And the church must learn to follow the headship God has established.

Do you believe that this fragmented, denominational, rebellious church, with each person, as Gregory says, like a lawless goat, everyone going his own way—do you believe that church is prepared to govern this earth, brothers and sisters? Do you believe that church is prepared to submit to apostolic authority? Brothers and sisters, among five Christians there are always seven opinions. If anything at all is decided here—as I used to say here in this church, thank You, Lord, that problem does not exist; Sister Promisa’s church does have those problems, but we do not—but here, brothers and sisters, any decision that is made, however tentative, often generates resistance, criticism, and second, third, and fifth opinions.

Do you believe we are ready to govern the nations? By no means. By no means. First we must learn to submit to authority. That is why, as I tell you, God has caught me in a trap with these sermons, because I did not understand many things until I began to prophesy and preach them: that God says, “My church, My people,” says the Lord—receive this as prophecy if you wish—“I am preparing to restore you and place you in authority, and I need you to prepare yourself, because time is short. Church, there is little time left; we must go to war.”

The time is approaching. There is not much time to prepare you at length as I would like. The time has already passed; the time for action has come. Morning is about to awaken, and only minutes remain for you to enter into what you must do. You must align yourself with Me. You must learn to wage war according to My methodology. You must learn to live according to My pattern, My Spirit, My heart, My mind, My way of thinking. You must learn to reason as I reason. You must learn to move like a well-formed, well-coordinated army that moves according to the directives issuing from the brain—the head, who is Christ—which pass down through apostolic authority, continue through its pastors and teachers, descend to the congregational leader, continue and reach the home, pass through the home to the child, and run through corporations, universities, healthcare centers, schools, and the seat of government: everything from the Father to the Son, to apostolic authority, to pastors, teachers, prophets, apostles, to the church, to the family, to the directors of corporations and different institutions—an entire system. And the church must learn, and the issue of authority is involved in all of this. Until the church learns to submit to authority, it cannot exercise authority.

And that is it. I am not even going to touch the text or anything, because I think you have plenty there—and I do too—to think about in what we have heard. But this is serious, brothers and sisters; it is very serious. Either I am going crazy, or God is speaking to me; there is no alternative. We are entering a serious time in the life of the church of Jesus Christ, and I tell you, brothers and sisters, take off your diapers, because the ugliest thing is an adult wearing a diaper. Let us put on the clothing of Christian adulthood. Let us learn what it means to be the body, the church of Jesus Christ. Let us take the Christian life seriously.

What Sister Carolina was sharing with you—and God seems to have coordinated it all very well—is precisely this: these are serious times. This is not about ironing your clothes on Saturday night because you are going to that little party they hold for you at Lion of Judah from twelve to two in the afternoon. This is much more important than that, more serious than that, more sublime than that. Angels are listening to this sermon. Who knows whether that angel Carina saw has not left and is still standing right there, listening to what I am saying and looking this way right now? Who knows? And there may also be a demon or two sitting around there with a pipe in their mouths, listening to all of this. May the Lord rebuke them in the name of Jesus.

Because it is serious. Belonging to the Kingdom of God is serious. I ask the Lord, “Lord, burn into me a sense of reverence for Your things. Consume me with a sense of the seriousness of the ground on which I am walking.” As God said to Moses, “Take the sandals off your feet, because the place on which you are standing is holy.” And wherever a child of God walks today is holy ground. Your home is holy ground. Your television is holy. Your iPod is holy. Your bed is holy. Your kitchen is holy. The machine at which you work from Monday through Friday is holy. Your car is holy. Your clothing is holy. Understand where you are walking.

“Church,” the Lord tells you, “things are getting serious,” and I am going to ask the musicians to come up here. Things are getting serious. God has turned the volume way up. We are living in important times. To my fellow musicians I say: your instruments are holy; the time is holy. That three and a half by twenty-five is holy—holy, serious, serious, serious, serious, serious. Listen to me. Serious, serious, serious, serious.

That is what the Lord says, and we must—I ask the Lord—do not let us come down from that revelation. Do not let us go back to business as usual, please, Father. Have mercy on us.

Everything becomes much more serious; the blessings can be millions of times greater, and so can the judgment and the consequences; everything increases proportionally, everything, everything. The Lord wants to open our hearts and our minds so that we understand what we are saying—starting with me. Beg God to help me understand what I am saying this afternoon, and let us ask the Lord: Father, give us what you are going to give; give it to us, and above all, prepare us to receive it. What you are going to do, do it if you want to do it, but do not let us profane, stain, or misuse what you place in our hands.

I ask the Lord: Father, never, ever, ever allow me, if you place something in my hands, to soil it for you. The only thing I ask of the Lord is that, if he is going to use us in any way, he enable us to rise to the level of what he places in our hands; that he cleanse us inwardly first and prepare us to be the people he needs us to be, so that we may use his authority properly, in a way that glorifies him, that accords with the principles of his kingdom, synchronized with the heart of God, synchronized with the program of God, synchronized with the mind of God, synchronized with the system of the Kingdom of God.

Help us, Lord, help us, help us, Father, help us. Place your holy fear within us; place your holy mind within us, Lord, and do what you are going to do, Father. We ask you, Lord: we want to see your glory. It is not so much that you restore your church; it is not so much that you give your church back its dignity; it is not so much that your church receive authority or power. Rather, we want to see the glory of God manifested; we want to see the name of Jesus lifted high; we want the Son to receive all the glory on earth that he deserves; we want the principles of the kingdom to govern this earth for as long as you desire; we want to give glory to the Son; we want to lift up the Son so that everyone who looks to him and believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. We want to be a sign in the world; we want to be a humble and broken, simple and meek people who walk this earth in priestly garments, reminding humanity that their Father loves them and wants reconciliation with them.

Help your church, Lord, to rise to the level at which you have called it to move. And today we give you glory and honor, Lord; today we say to you: Father, we acknowledge your glory and your greatness. Forgive us for not being more useful; forgive us for allowing ourselves liberties that we have no right to allow ourselves. Forgive us for being careless with your glory. Forgive us for being clumsy and having little understanding of what it means to walk in the Holy Place, where the lampstands with the seven tubes stand, through which flows the oil of God’s anointing, the flame of worship, the nearness of the Most Holy Place, the sound of the priests’ garments as they brush against their bodies, the silence of the Holy Place, the beauty of the engravings on the walls that you yourself commanded and designed, the fragrance of the incense. Forgive us for not discerning, Lord, where we are moving.

Help us to walk as your priests on this earth, Father. Break us, humble us, mold us, make us anew, Lord. Reconstitute your church; work in this church; change it, Lord. The offering we offer you is so poor, so weak; Father, we ask your forgiveness. It is what we have; help us give you more. We worship you; we bless you, Lord; we exalt you, exalt you, exalt you; we exalt you, exalt you, Lord; we exalt you. We bless you, Lord Jesus. He is God, he is Lord, and he needs his people to exemplify before humanity what a true relationship with him is. May the Lord help us to be the church he needs us to be. We are very far from being so, but we will keep striving; we will keep working so that it may be so.

I would like to ask you: would you dare to sing that hymn again, “High and Exalted”? Can you do it? Let us listen to it, brothers and sisters, in light of what we have received this afternoon. If possible, could the third from Promisa come up here? Come, let us listen to it, and listen to it there in meditation; and if you can, close your eyes, bow your head, receive from the Lord this… Look at that high and exalted Being: he is the God we serve, and that is the God whom we must treat with the utmost care.

May the Lord help me, who preach this message, to live at that level, brothers and sisters. I am very far from it, but I will keep trying and trying until I synchronize my life with what he needs.