There are going to be times when the Holy Spirit wants to speak, and we’re not going to get it right.  People are not going to get it right.  We make mistakes, don’t we?  Some of us get excited and get ahead of God.  Some of us seem to think that our opinion is God, so, we have to speak it to everybody and have a word for the whole community.  And we’ll see in 1 Corinthians 14 that God sets up judges to judge all of the moving of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to determine what’s of God and what isn’t.  That should make you as the fellowship feel much safer, that there’s not going to be anything coming in here that’s whacked; amen?  There are a lot of whacked things going on in Pentecostalism, today.  Well, there has been from the inception.  I won’t go into a lot of them right now or, necessarily, name any names.  But we’ve all heard of the West Virginia and Kentucky snake handlers.  There are people in the service, and they get themselves all worked up, and next thing, somebody grabs—I don’t know how they do it, whether somebody says, “Hey, get the snakes,” or whatever.  But they’ll bring in these snakes, and they’ll pass them around the church.  Poisonous snakes.

Now, why would you do that?  Because there’s a verse that says, right, that you can take up serpents, and they’re not going to harm you.  You can drink any deadly thing.  Listen to the contexts of what’s being said.  One of the greatest ways of assassination in those days was to poison somebody, hence, the cupbearers for the kings.  How many of you would like that job?  It was good paying.  “Here, drink this and see if it’s poison.”  So, you get some of these whacked Pentecostals that read that one verse, take it out of context, and now, to show how super spiritual they are, they’re going to drink kerosene, or they’re going to drink some poison, or they’re going to handle these snakes.  No, thank you.  It’s in the Bible, but, taken out of context, it is not truth.  Amen?  Beloved, context is everything. 

You can’t just pick and choose Bible verses to make them say what you want them to say.  They have to say what they’re saying, in context.  To whom was being written?  Why was this being spoken toward at this particular moment; amen?  In fact, was it exclusive to this people, or was it a truth that’s universal for the church until Jesus comes?  Desire spiritual gifts.  We can’t let the fact that people are whacked out and do stupid things, then, cause us to shy away from what is rightfully ours through the redemption of Jesus Christ and is normative for the church under the unction of the Holy Spirit.  And that’s what’s happening today.  People are shying away.  People are afraid because of excesses.

So, tragically, and how smart Satan was, the power is being robbed out of the church.  Christianity has become intellectualism.  It’s become a knowledge of the Scriptures, a knowing of the Bible, but not a doing of the Bible, which fits in well with our society, today, because the government, trying to control the church, and it already is.  I mean, look, the church collapsed and bowed their knee in a matter of hours over Covid, which was nothing.  And promoted a bunch of lies—isn’t it interesting, today, even the government, the guys who sent out the restrictions and made the reports have finally owned up to the fact that masks did nothing.  And there are people still riding around in their cars with masks on.  Scared the tar out of everybody, right?

Now, I don’t want to get too far off that way, I’m making a point.  “So, because of Covid, you can’t meet.  Don’t you dare go see grandma on Thanksgiving; it’s a crime.  Don’t you go to church.”  Well, the Bible says I’m supposed to go to church.  It said, actually, the church met daily.  The command of God was, “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, and even more as you see the day approaching.”  Are we going to follow the government, or are we going to do what the Word of God says?  And put to this one simple, little test, the church just collapsed and misapplied Scripture doing it.  “Well, we’re to obey those that have the authority over you.”  Yes, as long as they’re not telling you not to obey God; amen?  Yes, we obey the authorities.  But the question was asked by the Holy Ghost-filled man: “Is it better to obey God or man?”  Those are things that are settled in our own hearts.