The Battle Is Spiritual

The Battle Is Spiritual

by John Hobbs

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

But let me say just a few things about Delaware. I have sort of picked on Delaware a great deal. And those of you who’ve been here would know that a lot of that’s been in fun. Some of it has been with great pain in terms of my own relationships there and the rebellion that I very openly confessed to you in the first evening that I shared with you. And it’s amazing how rebellion does color our perspective in terms of what God’s trying to do in our lives. And how ugly rebellion can make everything around you seem, to say nothing of how ugly it can make you, when folks have to put up with your mess all the time. But one of the blessings that I really want to confess out of being in Delaware is that I have met more godly men in 10 months living in Delaware than I had met anywhere else previously in ministry. And this past March I was privileged to take a group of 14 of our men down to a men’s conference at Montreat. All of whom have come back from that experience baptized in the Holy Spirit. All of whom come back fired up in the Lord. And I guess in this age in America I would like to spend time with you.

I won’t, but I’d like to spend time with you talking about the difference between people that are fired up for the Lord and folks who see themselves as being spiritual. And I think these days what we understand to be spiritual really has very little to do with being fired up for the Lord. But these guys came back fired up for the Lord. One of these men in the past five years that he’s been involved in activity in this church has brought over 240 people to church by himself. And the reason he keeps count is because he takes names and addresses and follows up on all of them. Seven of these men that went with me to Montreat are preaching somewhere every Sunday morning. Out speaking the word to groups of people who hear a very anointed word from God. All of these men hit the streets in Rehoboth and Salisbury, Seaford, all the surrounding area. Hit the streets in the name of the Lord and share Jesus with people one on one. I don’t know that you can pick too many churches and find 14 men that are that fired up for the Lord. The guy that brought over 240 people in the last five years, to give you some idea where he’s come from as a person.

I mean, he’s one of these guys that you run into but you don’t bring home to mama. Where all of his teeth have rotted out. Where, to be honest, he don’t smell good all the time, you know, if you’re sitting next to him. He does now. Because when Jesus got him, He transformed his life. He gave him a new set of teeth. You can talk to him and not have to hide yourself. He’ll tell you that. But one of the things that he did not long ago was that he dropped off in a house and began to witness to this young man who had a young wife who had two small children. And after he had spent his time witnessing, the man said to him, “Don’t you remember the last time you saw me?” Dickie didn’t even remember that he had seen him before, period. Let alone the last time he saw him. But the last time Dickie had seen this man was some years ago. And he had the man hanging out the side door of a van with a Venetian blind cord wrapped around his neck, running down the highway at 55 miles an hour to see how close he could drop the man’s head to the pavement without touching it. Same man.

And now the Lord has sent him in the house to witness Jesus to him. That’s a mighty God. You might not get thrilled about that. But that’s a mighty God that would take men and bring them that far and send them out in the name of His Son. That’s a blessing to me. I was telling some folks that one of the guys has a restaurant called S&J, which stands for Stanley and Jesus. And he shares the Lord with all the folks who come into his restaurant. He’s wider than he is tall. Sweats like whatever you call them that sweat a lot. Wears a bandana around his head all the time. It’s a bad looking dude. Loves Jesus. Shares the Lord with great love. That’s a blessing. Isn’t that a blessing? It’s an incredible blessing. Do you know that for nine months, every day of the week, I was able to teach the Bible to 30 kids? We have a school that goes K through 12. I teach all the juniors and seniors Bible. For nine months, I had the privilege of discipling 30 kids every day. All my life, I wanted to minister in the lives of young people. I have done it all my life. But because of the rebellion I was in about not wanting to be there, I couldn’t even see the blessings that God was really bringing.

So I’m looking forward really to getting back to Delaware and enjoying what God has done in spite of me and what He has provided for me to enjoy because of His love and His presence. So, we invite you to Delaware. If you want to come, you may have to put up with the chicken caca, and the air may be thick with it when you get there. But we invite you to come. Now, I want to share some things with you tonight that are very close to my heart. And I don’t know that what I’m going to say is going to be pleasing to you at all. Normally, I would say, it really don’t make any difference to me what it is or not. But it does make a difference to me. I do care that you receive what I want to say to you. I care because I believe God’s laid on my heart. And so I pray that you’d be open to what the Spirit has to say to you. This spring in May, I went down to do a men’s conference for Myrtle Grove Presbyterian Church outside of Wilmington. Ken Helser and I were doing it together. And I had been invited to speak on the subject of men of God, which is a common subject folks ask you to talk about when you go to a men’s conference.

Well, I didn’t really feel led that that’s what I’ll talk about. But I spent a few minutes beginning to share with the guys. And one of the things I said to them was, “Look, guys, I’m really not interested in being a man right now.”

There’s a part of me that has forgotten how to be a child. And for far too long, I’ve taken myself too seriously. I’d really like to learn to be my Father’s son all over again. I’d like to learn how just to be a child in my Father’s house and frolic around in His fields of flowers and be held next to His bosom and just know His love for me. And let Him somehow redefine me as His child, hoping that when I learn how to be His son, I might learn how to be a man by watching my Father, taking a good look at His nature.

I told the guys that the most profound thing that I knew about ministry was to show up. And that’s the truth. It never has been my ministry anyway. I don’t care what you’re doing in ministry. It’s not yours. It’s really the Lord’s. The highest thing you can do is show up.

So through you, He can do His work. The most profound thing theologically that I know, there are things I have questions about, this I know, is that Jesus loves me. He really loves me. And somehow the knowledge of that love has made all the difference in my life and caused me to be translated into a dimension of living with a new transformation from the inside that’s not possible any other way.

And that one of the greatest needs in my life and in the need of the body was to learn how to laugh all over again. Learn how to be children. And we’ve been so busy building a kingdom for our Father so that we can bless Jesus with it that we’ve forgotten what it means to be the family of God. Don’t know how to enjoy one another. We walk seeing ourselves as being spiritual. But we’re just fleshing out our own will and calling it His much of the time. And we make complicated issues out of very simple things sometimes. And find ourselves broken and depressed and separated, alienated from one another and from Him. And all He wants us to do is sit still long enough so that His Son Jesus can come and wash our feet and teach us how to receive all over again, that we might have something to give that’s worth giving.

Now, I’m convinced that in America, we’ve been blessed and cursed. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I love this country. But not everybody is an American Christian. Praise God. We’ve been blessed in a land where we can be free to worship and free to serve and free to gather in places like this and praise the name of Jesus. But we’ve sold our people a Christianity that is so cheap that we’ve lured them into a lifestyle that, because we can’t find anything more profound to do, we bicker about the color carpet in our sanctuaries. And we run from pillar to post trying to find a deeper teaching than the one we got last week. And men come to share the word of God with us and we perch back in our seats waiting for somebody to impress us with some new deep teaching. And I’m going to tell you something, folks. You are not ever going to hear anything deeper than Jesus loves you.

It’s the deepest thing you’re ever going to process in your being, is that love that He has for you. But we got a country where Christians have spent far more time demanding from God than they have been willing to get in line with the requirements of being a member of His family.

CFO’s not immune to that. You understand that? Because CFO, like churches, other religious institutions, is made up of people. And people are the ones that have the difficulty. This building ain’t got a problem. You understand? This building going to be what it is when you’re gone. It was what it was before you got here. It’s the same since we’ve been here. This building doesn’t have a problem. We got the problem.

I want to share some things with you from the Word. And I want you to hear this in love in terms of what I’m dealing with myself, with myself, what I’m dealing with with the church I serve and the people I minister to on the road and what I really honestly believe that the body of Christ has got to get back to and deal with in an honest way. And since you and I are members of the body, we qualify.

And I ask you to hear this as the Lord would speak it to your hearts. If you’d turn with me in your scriptures to the 12th chapter of Romans. And let’s begin with the first verse. And if this is not the thriller from Manila for you, please understand I love you and I’d like to come back sometime to be a part of the CFO, but I don’t have to. So, I hope you receive it and respond to it in a way so as to let God minister to you. But I’m not sharing it with you to impress you with it. “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,” to present yourselves, in the light of God’s mercy, in the light of the fact that God withheld deserved punishment from you and me, in light of His mercy, present yourselves, your bodies, your total being, present yourselves to the Lord. “This is your spiritual act of worship.” Jesus talking to the woman at the well: “The time will come, and now is, that when all true worshipers worship, they will worship God in spirit and in truth.” And all other worship that is not of the spirit is an abomination before the Lord. Only that which is spiritual manages to, with the fragrance of His precious Son, reach the nostrils of God.

Your spiritual worship, that presentation of yourself, spiritual worship. “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is, His good, His pleasing, and His perfect will.” Now I want to walk through that scripture with you just a little bit, taking parts of it and spending some time with it, realizing that there’s far more there than I can speak to, but I just want you to stay with me long enough to hear a little bit of what I think God would have us deal with this evening.

Betty Jo and I got married in Wilmington, North Carolina, 23 years ago, the 23rd of this month. Now I had come off the beach. Putting on a coat and tie never thrilled me a great deal, let alone wading into a tux. I would rather watch flies kiss, grass grow, seaweed move, anything, than have to dress like that and spend a sweaty hour or two at a wedding.

But I love this lady and God gave me the opportunity to come to her in marriage and present myself to her. And honey, I want you to know I was as bad as Dan’s wife. When we got married, I wanted to present myself to my wife. I wanted her to have all of me that she wanted. And I wanted to make sure that we shared all of one another with each other that we wanted for as long as we could. There was a presentation there between the two of us. Her to me and me to her. Because I loved her. Love her more now in a deeper way than when we first got together in marriage 23 years ago. I preached my first sermon when I was 16 years old. I didn’t get saved until I was 29. A lot of stuff has gone down for me in terms of growth, nonsense, immaturity, other things over the past 30 years. But one thing I have discovered, that my first responsibility in all things is to love Jesus and to present myself to Him. Not to the people that I’m speaking to. Not to the people I’m ministering to. But to present myself first to Jesus. So that everything that comes out of that really is an act of worship.

That when I present myself to Jesus and offer Him all that there is of me, the Word says, that’s my spiritual worship. You want to sit in some churches and sit in some CFOs and ask yourself why worship has not occurred? Why you haven’t experienced worship? Let me tell you something. Most of the time it’s because we’re holding ourselves back. It’s because we’re not presenting ourselves to the Lord. Everybody who comes to church on Sunday morning, everybody who comes to a CFO comes with a hidden agenda of one kind or another. And we find ourselves on these occasions when we would sing choruses or great hymns with God there waiting to bless us, to transform us, to accept us into His presence by the power of the Holy Spirit. But we can’t bring ourselves to present ourselves to the Lord.

Because those are areas in our lives where we just not ready to turn loose of yet. That we just want to hold on to. Because we have determined areas in our lives where we really want to do it our way and we’re not ready to present ourselves as unto the Lord. The one thing that we need to understand in terms of the body is that you don’t make worship happen. Worship occurs when we offer ourselves and the Spirit then lifts us in such a way as to have that worship be meaningful before the Father. In our churches, we will do it with three hymns and a poem, a glory of pottery and a decent offering and a benediction and maybe a mini sermon. Sometimes in CFO, we’ll try to do it with 15 choruses or 16 choruses. We go home and it ain’t happened yet and we’re still wondering. It happens when God’s people are willing to present themselves unto the Lord.

You know, I think a pertinent question that Jesus put to Peter has everything to do with presentation of oneself. “Do you love Me? Do you love Me? Do you really love Me? Do you love Me more than all of these other things?” Do you love Him enough to present yourself bodily, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually? “Are you willing to present yourself to Me?” Worship.

One of the things we discovered in our youth camps was that worship is a vehicle that God uses to break barriers down in people. So that in the midst of worship, I have seen people healed, set free, made whole. Haven’t you? Haven’t you? People who came in tight as a tick, bent up like a drum, and all of a sudden, worship, true worship breaks out, and in the midst of all of that, God’s presence is so strong that He just sovereignly sweeps across everybody that’s there, and anybody who’s open and can receive and does receive is healed and set free. Worship is a crucial issue.

So many of us have never, ever discovered what true worship really is because we’ve never been willing to present ourselves to the Lord. We are ready for the Lord to present to us. A lot of churches have made a living. A lot of preachers have built earthly kingdoms by convincing the people about how much God wants to present to them, with ever mentioning what God requires in terms of the presentation of themselves. And church after church, hour after hour on Sunday morning, throughout this land, people are gathering together believing that they’re worshiping God, and all they’re doing is having a soulish experience.

If we’re going to come to CFO and be transformed, part of that has to do with honestly presenting ourselves to the Lord without apology. I want to tell you something, honey, you can’t come to God in your three piece suit. Honey, you come to God naked as a jaybird, with nothing covering you, hiding nothing from the Lord, acknowledging your weaknesses, confessing those areas where there’s bitterness and resentment, being willing to stand in front of your brothers and sisters and say, “Excuse me, I have messed up, honey. I ain’t worthy to be here, but through the blood of the Lamb I can come, and I present myself without apology to the Lord.” That’s missing in a lot of places these days.

Several other things here I want you to hear, if you don’t mind, if you just stay with me for just a few minutes. “Don’t conform any longer to the world, but be transformed.” Transformation is an interesting word. And what Satan has done in the body of Christ, what he’s done in our families, what he’s done in our churches, is that he has persuaded us that what we want is change when what God offers is transformation, not change. When Dan was talking about passing through the sea and the sea closing and everything that was behind him was locked, put away, taken from them, done away with, when you pass from death unto the life that God has for you through the blood of the Lamb, when you believe in Jesus and that old nature is put away, I’ve been crucified with Christ, but I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me. The old things are dead. I’m a new creature. It’s dead, honey. I don’t even know where the box is buried. He’s dead. But yet in me, there is that tendency to reach back and allow that old nature to dominate. But I’m talking transformation, honey. Transformation has to do with taking on a new nature. Transformation and change are not the same thing. You got a kid giving you problems? You don’t like their behavior?

If you want change, honey, you can get change. If it’s change you want, baby, you can get it. You want me to tell you how you get change with a kid? I don’t care how rebellious they are. You want me to tell you how you get change? You strap them in a chair and you pull all their teeth on one side with no anesthetic. They will change. Every time you walk by them, they’ll flinch. And whatever it is they were doing, you tell them not to do it, honey. They will not do it. They will not do it. You will change their behavior. Get a two by four, take them in the backyard, crack them across the nose four times. You do it again, I’m going to break your legs. You want change? You can get change.

All you got to do to get change in your brothers and sisters or your mom and daddy or anybody else is either increase the pleasure to where they like it so much that they do what you tell them to do, or increase the pain to where they can’t stand it so you’ll quit. You can get change. When we took our son to a psychiatrist and he worked with him for a while, worked with me a little while, thought both of us were nuts and finally said to my son, “Brother, you are a messed up boy, and we’re going to change your behavior.” I thought, praise God, that’s good. Anything can be a relief. Fix him any way you can. And the Holy Spirit spoke deep down in my little heart and said, “You don’t want change. You want your boy to have a new heart. You want transformation. You don’t want change.” But I’ll tell you something, in the body of Christ, we have accepted change as God’s highest and best. If we can get people to look right, smell right, do right, talk right, that’s cool. In the name of Jesus, we pronounce them king’s kids. And all the while, God is saying, “Press in for transformation. We don’t want change. We want transformation. We want new creatures.”

We don’t want people that are made over. We want new creatures. Transformed people. A little story I like is about folks that get mad at bulldogs because they can’t fly. And birds because they don’t bark. When the truth of the matter is, dogs are going to bark, birds are going to fly, unless they get a new nature. All right? And then you get a bird dog. Don’t you like that?

You got people in your church, you get mad at them for not acting like Christians? Huh? You scream and holler. You say, “How can a Christian do that?” Hey, there’s a possibility that maybe they ain’t. Maybe they’re acting according to their nature.

Y’all still listening to me? Whenever we can get changed so that folks do what we want them to do the way we want them to do it, and it doesn’t cause us a problem, that’s cool. That’s not what God wants. God wants transformation. Let me tell you about transformation.

Transformation has to do with going to Calvary. Has to do with going to Calvary. Please understand that. When I was down at St. Simon’s Island three years ago, I ran into the meanest, ugliest, most obnoxious 14-year-old boy I’d ever met in my life.

I mean, honey, he was obnoxious. And I’m the director of the camp, and all I want to do is jack this boy upside the head. That’s the truth. I was that angry with him. He brought a box with him, a big box. And a bass guitar. And he liked to play his tapes. Good tapes. Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne. Good tapes. Everybody in the camp needed to hear them. He wouldn’t play them in the daytime only. He played them two, three, four o’clock in the morning. Not just for his pleasure, but for everybody in the camp. So I go to him. I said, “Boy, let me tell you something. You keep the mess up, I’m going to take your stuff.” “You can’t take my stuff. My daddy, he paid for this room, man. You can’t come and take my stuff. It’s my stuff.” I said, “We’ll take your stuff.” He kept messing. We took his stuff. Put it in his daddy’s apartment, where it ought to be. Where he should have been. And next time I see him, he has cornered two counselors who are very precious to me that I deeply love. And he is questioning their heritage. And explaining to them what they’re really like in the natural. So when I get there, I get very angry.

And I want to hit this boy so hard that his head would float in the inland waterway. I was very, very angry unto sin. You understand? And I had this big six-foot-four boy we had brought from Bethel with us, who was a very close friend of the family, who was big enough to break this other six-foot-four boy in half. And when I looked at Daniel, have you ever heard somebody, and please forgive my language here, have you ever asserted somebody the terminology or the expression that you’re so mad you could spit? Well, Daniel was standing over there with his legs crossed. Just spit. He was so mad, all he wanted to do was get a hold of this boy. So I said to the boy, I said, “Son, I want you to go back to the room and pack your stuff. We’re going to move you in with your daddy.” He said, “I ain’t moving my stuff. Who is going to move my stuff? Who’s going to move me out of my room?” I said, “I’m going to move you out of your room.” “Ain’t nobody moving me out of my room.” I said, “You get to your room. I’m going to go find your daddy, son.” So I went and got his daddy, and by the time we got down there, he and his buddy had split.

And they had run off into the woods. Now we at St. Simons Island. Not many places to go, but he went off to the woods. So his daddy and the people standing around when we got there and the boy’s gone said, “What are we going to do?” I said, “Lock the place up. Let him sleep on the porch.” “But he’s in the woods.” “I don’t care if he’s in the woods. There’s not a moccasin or a copperhead in Georgia mean enough to bite that kid. Let him stay out there.”

Now, that didn’t please the daddy a whole lot. But now he came in at four o’clock in the morning and he slept on the porch. I was hot and I sinned. My anger was controlling everything about me. And I’m directing the camp. Two days later, I’m sitting there at a meeting of the staff. And I come out of the meeting. And as I walk out the door, the Lord, Dan would call it a notion. Whatever it is, it’s the Lord speaking to you. The Lord said to me, “John, you need to go apologize.” I said, “Do what?” He said, “You need to go find Matt and apologize.” I said, “Lord, there are a lot of things I need to do. That ain’t one of them.” He said, “You go and apologize.” So I went and knocked on the door. The boy came. I said, “Can I come in?” He said, “Mm.” So I went on in. We sat down. I looked at him. I said, “Matt, I want to apologize. I need your forgiveness. I spoke in anger to you. I spoke truth to you, and I don’t apologize for that. But I did not reflect the image of my Father. And I need your forgiveness.” So he grunted out of forgiveness. His mom and daddy came in.

We had a few words that didn’t please them. But one of the things I said to his father before I left the room was, “You,” meaning him, the father, “need to be the head of this household and take this boy and get him in line in your family.” And whatever happened, he heard me. The next thing on the agenda was rhythms. He told the boy, he said, “You will go to rhythms.” “What, do you like it? What, do you don’t?” “You will go.” He went. And when he got there were a group of our kids that were also part of that section of rhythms. And we were working on the Good Samaritan. You remember the… Have you ever done that Good Samaritan? Where you have an innkeeper. You have somebody that’s sick and broken. You have somebody that’s… That’s the innkeeper. Anyway, so they went to him. A group of the kids went to him. And they said, “Look, we need somebody that’s wounded. You look like you qualify.” So they picked this boy up, all six foot, four inches of him, took him over, laid him in the floor, and hovered around him. And in a matter of minutes, I saw this big old boy shoot up through the middle of those people. Tears.

Confessing Jesus. In a moment’s time, the boy had been converted. Now, two things happened. I had to go to Calvary. He had to go to Calvary. I had to go to Calvary first. There needed to be a transformation in my heart. I didn’t need the heart of John Hobbs, the hot-headed boy from the beach. I needed the heart of Jesus. I needed the mind of God. I needed the willingness to, in compassion, reach out to this kid. I had to get to Calvary before this boy did. When I got there, God moved on a daddy, on some kids, and on this boy. And one of the very delightful sights we saw was that old six-foot-four boy wanting to testify in the evening. When he stepped backwards, he fell down on the thing on his bottom. And before, he would have been embarrassed beyond measure, but he jumped right back up and said, “I’m not embarrassed. Today, I accepted Jesus in my heart.” Now, that was transformation. Not change, you understand? Not change. Transformation. But you cannot have transformation without having Calvary. And one of the problems that has taken the power out of the movement of God in this country, in our churches, and in other organizations that lift up the name of Jesus is that they have removed Calvary.

We don’t require people to go to Calvary anymore. We don’t present the cross to them. We don’t, would Dietrich Bonhoeffer say that the call to discipleship is a call to come and die? A call to die out to self. A call to lay hold of the life of God. A willingness to be naked and let God transform us into new creatures. We don’t deal with that anymore. We’re too sophisticated. We live in a whole society of Christians that have been fed a gospel that if you’ll say the name of Jesus, look right, act right, sit in church on Sunday morning, go to the right meetings, listen to the right tapes, hear the right teacher, respond with your eyes rolled back and your hands lifted up, looking spiritual, that somehow you’re gonna be all right. I’ll tell you something, people. Anything you get into that hadn’t got the cross of Jesus in it, you better find a way to go somewhere else. Without Calvary, there is no power in this life and there is no transformation, just change. Hitler got change.

Transformation comes by the power of God when people are willing to present themselves to the cross at Calvary. Let me tell you just one more thing from this scripture and ask you to hear it. “Don’t be conformed to the world.” We’ve done that over the past 25, 30 years in America with Christianity. Do you all understand that? Do you understand that? That we have constructed our churches so as to reflect the world. We’ve allowed the world to conform our lives and our churches to the world. Rather than allowing ourselves to be transformed and then being transforming agents in the world, we have been conformed to the world. So that we run our churches by the Dow Jones average and the prime interest rate. We pick speakers for this and for that by their appeal to people and whether or not their message is palatable to us. Not whether it’s anointed, not whether it speaks the truth, not whether it works the power of God when it comes out, but whether or not it’s pleasing to us, so that all around us there are coveys of churches that have the form of godliness but deny the power daily of God, because we’ve been conformed to the world.

“Don’t be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mindset.” And I’m going to say this very quickly if I can. There is a battle going on, and we’ve been so deceived by the easy kind of spiritual life that we have found in America that we don’t understand, one, that we’re in the battle; two, we don’t have any idea what the nature of it is, even if we know where the battle is; and three, we’re losing.

The battle that’s going on is in the spirit realm. It is a spiritual battle, and the battle is for your mind, and the price or the cost is your soul and the souls of your children and the souls of your friends and relatives. And we better wake up and smell the coffee in this country.

This is exciting, isn’t it? When we train missionaries now to go to the third world countries, we have to deprogram them from American Christianity because they’ve gotten so used to operating in the natural that if they go to a third world country where that spiritual warfare is so intense and up front, they get killed. They cannot handle it. Don’t know how to relate to it.

There’s a blessing to that spiritual battle in the third world countries. When revival breaks out in Indonesia, the lame walk, the dead are raised, the lepers are cleansed, broken people are made whole, because those folks don’t know any better than to believe what the word says. And that the Spirit of God moves with such freedom because they welcome Him into their lives that the gifts of the Spirit are the natural flow of things. In America we got to whip it up with deep teaching before we get the gifts to flow.

Because we’re so used to the natural. We run our churches by the natural. We run our lives by the natural. Sometimes we run our CFOs by the natural. When all the while God has said, hey, the battle is spiritual. The battle is spiritual.

You all know Kenny Davis well, and you’ve heard me chuckle about Kenny, and you’ve heard me tell you some stories about Kenny. I want to tell you something about Kenny Davis. Kenny Davis moves in the spirit realm with as much freedom and sensitivity as any other person I have met at any time. He’s not the deepest person you would know theologically unless you understand what true love is, and then you would discover that he’s very deep. He’s not complicated, but he understands that the battle is spiritual.

About four years ago at one of our youth camps on a Wednesday evening, Ken Helser was supposed to be there to do the music, but his father had open heart surgery and Kenny had to leave. So Kenny Davis, who had been in the camp, did the worship that night. After we’d had worship, which was rather uneventful, we just felt the need to pray for some of the kids. We offered an opportunity for any kids that wanted prayer to come up to one counselor on one side or the other and just to get there and pray. When the first kid got to the first counselor, the Spirit of God fell in the room, and we had 120 kids slain in the Spirit. It was an absolutely incredible sovereign move of God that was awesome. This one girl, and this went on for over two and a half hours, and whether that fits into your theology or not, I’m really not, you know, trying to fit it into anything. I’m just telling you what happened. And 120 kids spread out on the floor.

This one girl named Prue Smith had come to camp having tried to commit suicide twice. Her mother had terminal cancer. Had it in the kidneys. Was paralyzed from the waist down. Was not expected to live very long. Was in the hospital at Duke Medical Center during the time that Prue was at camp.

Prue came to camp with great fear. Paralyzed by it. That every time she would leave home she was afraid her mother would be dead when she got back. So she lived in an incredible fear. Her father dropped her off at camp with a lot of fear. Wednesday night Prue was one of those slain in the Spirit. The Lord knocked her out of a chair. I mean she was sitting in a chair. Flew out of the chair and hit the floor. And when she hit the floor she began to scream like a wild animal. Took seven guys to hold her. Kenny Davis jumped on her chest with his knees landed there, and gripped her around both shoulders and began to scream, “You can’t have her!”

“Come out!” For two hours he screamed. And she screamed. It didn’t bother another kid in the place because they didn’t know it. Her whole physical demeanor had changed. She still had the slash marks on her wrist but her face was transformed. And she began to share that the only thing she remembered was there was light on one side of her, darkness on the other side. She felt as though she were going to die, and she felt herself being pulled from one side to the other, and the only thing she could hear was somebody saying, “You can’t have her. You can’t have her. You can’t have her.” It was a spiritual battle. The enemy wanted to destroy her. On Friday, when her father came to pick her up, he saw her all the way across the parking lot and broke into tears. Because he knew that the girl he brought to camp was not the same girl that he was taking home. He took her from there to Duke Medical Center. And when she got to Duke Medical Center, she found a mother who was very depressed and who wanted to die. A mother who on that Wednesday night when the Spirit fell on that group of kids in Black Mountain had died. And it was two hours when Prue went into rest. Two hours after her mother was clinically dead, she was stabilized again. The enemy was trying to destroy both her and her mother.

Prue said, “Mom, why don’t you go home with me? Let’s go home. Don’t stay up here and die.” She went home. Prue was killed in a one-car accident. One year from the day of her Christmount experience. In her Bible, she had written, “My Christmount birthday.” That was the same day. The same day she was buried. One year from that day. But let me tell you a little bit about what God did in that one year. She took her mother home. She taught her mother how to walk again. She convinced her mother to take a medication that the doctors felt had a 75% chance of killing her and a 25% chance of helping her. She took the medication. Today, her mother, according to medical records at Duke Medical Center, is, in their words, arrested. But her kidneys are regenerating themselves. She walks and they can’t find any cancer. During the year that Prue was home, she led her swim team to the Lord. She led her swim coach to the Lord. They had prayer meetings 45 minutes prior to every swim meet. They found a prayer journal in her room where she had been praying for the teenagers that were friends for her that she loved. And by the time they had her coronation service, every teenager that she had prayed for had come to the Lord.

And the day that they had her service, 40 kids came to the Lord at that service. What I’m trying to get you to understand is that the battle is spiritual. And it’s not fun and games. It’s serious business. The enemy will do whatever he’s got to do to destroy our faith. And if he can take our children, if he can take our health, anything he can take, he will take to get at our faith. Now the Word says, don’t be conformed to the world. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now your mind is renewed by the Spirit of God. When you are born again, the Spirit of the living God takes up residence in you. And from the time He moves in, He wants to give you the mind of Christ. The Word says, “Let this mind be in you that is in Christ Jesus.” You can have the mind of Christ. But the enemy wants you to have the mind of the world. He wants you to operate in the natural. He wants you to stay in the natural realm. He does not want you to take on the mind of Christ. So there is a constant war going on within us. Where the enemy wants to give us the spirit of the world, and the Holy Ghost wants to give us the mind of Christ.

And the one that wins is the one that you feed the most. The one that you’re willing to nurture the most. And you can’t nurture that one which is the Spirit of God unless you recognize that it is a spiritual battle and that the Spirit must be fed.

Our sister made the comment, or someone made the comment since I’ve been here, “Flesh feeds flesh. Spirit feeds spirit.” And unless we learn to worship in spirit and truth, worship has no meaning for us. Unless we’re willing to be transformed and go to Calvary, we cannot know that ministry of the Spirit that speaks life to our spirit. We have to feed the Spirit the things of the Spirit in order to be strong enough to do the battle that is before every one of us every day. And we take so many things for granted. We sit back and we watch dumb TV commercials. And we think it ain’t no big deal. I watch the Silver Bullet commercials. You watch the Silver Bullet commercials till I’m about freaked out. We’re talking about Coors Light. You watch Coors Light? I’m not asking you, do you drink it? I’m saying, have you seen the commercial on TV? You look at that little commercial and it seems to be a rather innocuous kind of thing. No big deal at all. You watch it, right? Everybody’s around the room. Nobody’s grossing anybody out. But they’re drinking Coors Light beer. But if you watch carefully in the commercial, you find that there’s some folks there that are wearing high school letters. You don’t think it’s any big deal, but let me tell you the big deal.

The big deal is that the enemy is trying to conform you and your children to the world, and he’s trying to tell your children in the spirit realm that it’s okay to drink beer. I’m not crazy. The battle’s spiritual. You watch the car commercials? One of my favorite car commercials had to do with Cougars. You ever watch Cougar commercial from years ago where they had this nice-looking black Cougar sat on a little thing that went around and around and around? The light would hit it and it would glisten. Nice-looking automobile. But you know how they sold the automobile to you? They had this sleek-looking honey come out with a white dress. They clung to everything that was hers and wasn’t hers. And you watch the honey. She goes right down the side of that automobile, pats it all the way down, gets to the front of that thing, cocks back on the front of it, and you grin and say, “What a car, what a car, what a mighty car.” And what the enemy is doing is hooking you on fellowship with the girl and the natural and selling you the Cougar to do the same thing with the Budweiser commercials. You watch the Budweiser commercials? If you watch a ball game, you watch a Budweiser commercial.

Why do you think they put Budweiser commercials with ball games? Because there are millions of people out there in that age bracket that are targeted for getting beer. That’s why they do it. But you watch them standing around the bar? You do, don’t you? You have, haven’t you? You haven’t you? Okay. But you don’t see me standing up there in a three-piece suit with a 20-pound Scofield laying across the bar with them dudes walking around saying, “This bud’s for you, bless God. For all that you do, this bud’s for you.” You see four or five macho guys with muscles hanging out, their sleeves cut, walking around, patting one another on the bottom saying, “This bud’s for you. This bud’s for you.” You know what they’re doing? They’re hooking you on the fellowship that your spirit needs with Almighty God. They’re conforming you to the counterfeit fellowship of the world and they’re selling you beer.

People, this is serious business. Now, I’m not trying to be hard and come down on a hard message. This is serious business. Our teenagers every day are being blinded in the spirit realm and they don’t even know it.

That’s why music is such a crucial issue. Music ministers to the spirit. Gets down inside of you. And if he’s going to minister to that spirit of the world in you, and you get the message of the world, and the enemy can get you to concentrate on that message, he feeds that spirit and that spirit controls.

What’s wrong with music is not the beat or the noise. What’s wrong with it is the spirit that controls it and the message it brings. But our kids get deceived by it. We sit around and scream and holler because we don’t like the way the people dress who sing it or how loud they play it. And all the while, it ain’t got nothing to do with how they dress or how loud they play it. It’s a spiritual battle. And the enemy is using it to destroy.

But in America, we’re so used to dealing in the natural realm that we don’t somehow know how to deal with the battle that is spiritual. The Lord wants us to have His mind. The Holy Spirit moves in us to give us the mind of Christ because the battle is spiritual in all things.

Now, present yourselves, which is your spiritual worship. Don’t settle for being changed. Be transformed. Take it to Calvary. Let the blood of the Lamb make it fresh and new. Learn that your mind is what the enemy would destroy and conform to the world because he knows that your mind is going to dictate your behavior. And if he, through the spirit of the world, can control your mind, he’ll have you doing the things of the world and moving away from the things of God. But the Holy Spirit on your behalf is moving in every way to give you the mind of Christ. But we have to choose to feed that Spirit. And somehow, in this country of ours, we have got to move to that place where we have the discernment that comes only from God so that we’ll understand the difference between that which is flesh and that which is Spirit. So that we’ll have the capacity to do battle in the Spirit realm.

Now, why would I tell you this on a beautiful little Monday evening? Tuesday evening? Why would I tell you this on a good old Monday evening? Because every one of us has been given that special privilege of being a child of God. And Jesus does not want to lose one of us out of His Father’s hand.

And He’s provided the way by which we can be kept. If we will give ourselves to God, present ourselves to Him, offer ourselves up to Him, if we’ll be willing to let that transforming power of the presence of the resurrected Lord of glory move us daily to Calvary so that we don’t think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, so that we understand what dying out to our will means and what it means to live to the will of God. So that we know what it means to be freshly cleansed by the blood of the Lamb. What it means to be before God that He might do with us as He chooses. If we will be willing to let the Spirit in us be fed by the things of the Spirit so that we can have the mind of Christ that we can stand. Now, the Word says that if you’re willing to do that, you will be able to prove out in your own life what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God for you. If we can learn to do those three things, we can learn to know, to see, to experience, to walk in that perfect will of God in our lives. One of the problems that I have had, and you folks pray for me, is that I haven’t had as much patience with religious people as I have had with folks that are just busted.

And I’m learning. I think it’s one reason I’m in Delaware, to learn to deal with religious folk. Because I think sometimes they just soon get rid of me as quick as I would like to leave. Because somehow there’s a greater compassion that comes out of me for kids that are strung out on drugs, for young ladies with unwanted pregnancies, for those who’ve had abortions and don’t know how to get over the guilt of it, for parents that don’t know how to relate, for marriages that are broken, for alcoholics that can’t get rid of the alcohol. There’s a greater compassion there. Lord’s given me a compassion in the other direction. But it’s imperative that we learn. And somehow reach out. That we are honest with one another. That we recognize that as members of the family, we don’t always hit on all cylinders. But that the love of God is such that He wants to bring us together in the body with such integrity and such harmony that the world outside of us will see Jesus in the midst of us. It’s really what the whole thing is all about. Then we can stand against all of the wiles of the enemy, and stand as the church of God. So, I ask you to pray for me as I learn.

You know, to be more loving in some areas. And pray for me as I try to discern a little better between those things that are the flesh and those things that are really of the Spirit of God. But don’t miss what the Spirit might be saying to you tonight through this scripture. Hear what He’s saying in terms of your own needs and the needs of those folks around you. Because I believe God really wants to bless us. But for far too many years we wanted the power of Jesus, but we’ve not wanted to walk the walk that He walked, to go to places that He went, or even to go to places that He would have us to go right now. And I’m discovering that if you really want the purity and the power of Jesus, that you’ve got to be willing to present yourself and be transformed, and take on the mind of Christ, and go where He would go, and do the things that He would do. And one comment and I’ll close. When you sell out that way to Jesus, you’re going to find yourself living a life of inconsistency with the world. It’s not consistent. It’s not consistent to go into a tavern on Sunday afternoon and shoot pool. That’s not consistent.

With the religious mindset of the world. But when two people are converted. Because you remember whose you are. Who you are. And why you’re there. It’s consistent with the heart of God. It’s not consistent with the world. When that person wants to rack you upside the head and destroy your reputation, and you go to them and fall on your knees and grab them by the ankles and weep with compassion for their souls, it’s not consistent with the world. But it’s consistent with the heart of God. We’ve got to learn, if we want His purity and power, we’ve got to take on His lifestyle.

I want to ask you to pray with me just a minute as we close. Father, You know our hearts. You know every motivation that’s a part of us. And Father, I should thank You for this beautiful group of people here. And I pray, Lord, that we would learn that the requirements of God only deliver us into the blessings of God. And that that which He requires of us, He already provides for us to walk it out. So, Father, I ask that as Jesus moves in our midst tonight, wanting in every area to be Lord, that we would submit to that. And that we would lay before Him tonight all of those areas that might separate us in any fashion from what You have for us. And teach us, Lord, to give. To empty out, that You might fill us up again with Yourself. And Lord, take those that are hurting because of broken relationships tonight. And just let them lay those relationships at the foot of Calvary. And wash them in Your blood. That Your love, that when it prevails, always is victorious. That that love will wash over those relationships and make them whole. And Lord, in these lives that have been broken and tainted. Where we’ve walked away from Your will. And where we know that we’ve entered into things that have destroyed and broken relationships.

And hurt feelings, Lord. Teach us right now that Your redemption can redeem and make whole and restore anything that the canker worm has taken away. Father, I just pray that we would become a godly people. Committed to godly ways. Submitted in love. Just to worship and praise and serve You. To the end that Your kingdom would be manifested in us and through us. And cause us to stop striving to build. And cause us to rest in You. Thank You, Father, for all of those folks who are here tonight. And I ask You to minister to the deepest needs that are present here. In Jesus’ name, Father, I thank You. I bless You. Amen.