The smoldering fires of the Lord are burning out the chaff of the old nature. There is less and less tolerance in our spirits toward the thing that is wrong. Daily, as I watch the fires of the Lord burn, a repulsion mounts in my spirit, forcing me to reject the limitations we have been under. We don’t know how to express it, but as something fierce begins to work at us, we are no longer content to stay under the bondage we were under. In fact, it takes this new revelation to even realize how much we are still bound. The fire is coming to burn off the ropes. We will go through the furnace of affliction and come out of it without even so much as the smell of smoke upon our garments.
We notice the spiritual harassment and oppression on our country. We are not concerned about which candidate is elected to a political office as much as we are concerned with binding the whole corrupt system, all the way down the line. The stench of it is going up to heaven. One can feel the obnoxious spirit. It ill behooves the politicians to piously talk about political corruption as though they were suddenly trying to save their souls. For the first time their mudslinging has taken on a serious note: “Judge and you will be judged.” God is going to deal with the whole stinking mess. Something of a finality is settling over the country.
In my spirit there is something taking place concerning dedication and a set determination to walk on with God and to do His will. It is no longer submitting, even for a single moment, to the coexistence of Babylon and Zion. One of them has to go, and it isn’t Zion! It is Babylon! There is no longer a tolerance to coexist with the corrupt political, financial, and religious system. Zion is not going to coexist with it. From now on there will be a grim dedication to bring Babylon down. We have prophesied and the Lord has put many cracks in the wall, and now is the time when the tanks will move in to blow it down. This is the time when God is going to undertake.
If I have shocked or repelled you in the past with an expression of the abhorrence in my heart for Babylon, I don’t apologize for it. I hope it has conditioned you for the extreme positions I will be taking in the future. God is going to bring it down. He is going to bring something to loose the people of God from it! As my spirit reaches up to God, it feels grieved because the fact remains that God’s people must be released from this bondage they are under. The time is too short for them to be held any longer as slaves to the system God is bringing down. There must be a release to God’s people. I know we are not playing church; we left that realm long ago. But we are no longer to be content with, or tolerant of, anything the Lord is bringing down; nor are we to be the least degree sensitive about it. Most of the ministers who have slowly drawn back from this position and from what God is revealing about Babylon have done so because they love her. They love Babylon!
It is difficult to understand what Babylon is. Babylon is like a woman who is sweet and soft, seductive and deceptive. She seems to be very rich and one is very impressed with her. The kings of the earth and those who have stood in places of religious authority find it difficult to draw back and get a realistic view of her because they have committed fornication with her. They can’t seem to see what she really is. Their hearts are snared with the great whore and her daughters. They can’t see what God is going to do with her, that she is going to be consumed. She rides on the beast now, but the beast will turn and devour her.
They can’t understand that this present system is going to end. The merchants of the earth will wail because their merchandise is lost and their business is destroyed. Their destruction will come in one hour. But there must be apostles and prophets who speak their judgments over her, for this is according to the Word of God: “Rejoice, ye apostles and prophets, because the Lord hath judged your judgment upon her. In one hour she comes down and the smoke of her torment will be unceasing. There will be no end to it. The fire that will consume her will be endless” (Revelation 18).
Be aware that the same fire is burning the Babylon out of your heart now, taking out of you that tolerance for her, and that contentment to go on without becoming vicious against her. God deliver us from that “sweet Jesus” spirit! Let us see Him whose vesture is dipped in blood, who treads out the winepress of the fierceness of His wrath, who comes to proclaim the day of vengeance of our God and to bring down everything that exalts itself against His Lordship and His rule (Revelation 19:13, 15).
We have to see this even though it is hard to understand. Over nineteen hundred years ago when Jesus came, it was just as difficult for people to embrace the truth that He had been born of a virgin and laid in a manger. It was hard for them to understand how deeply He had humbled Himself. They weren’t expecting that; they were expecting the Son of David to come with some kind of a slingshot that would knock down the giants of Rome. They were expecting something to free the Jews so they could rise arrogantly and proclaim themselves the chosen people of the earth. They weren’t prepared for the fact that instead of killing Goliaths, He would cast out devils, delivering people from their oppressions and causing them to rejoice in their liberations. They weren’t anticipating that nor were they expecting a man who was so humbled. He had no comeliness or beauty, that we should desire Him. And upon Him the Lord would lay the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:2, 6). If that was difficult for them then, how difficult is it for us now?
People have seen it on schoolroom walls, in churches, everywhere—that agonizing picture of Christ hanging on a cross. He hasn’t been on a cross for nineteen centuries. He is not on one now. He dwells in a glory unapproachable. But still people continue to think of Him as hanging upon the cross! He is not hanging on a cross; He is King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah. He has won all of these things. His is the right to rule. His is the right of Lordship and dominion. His is the right to declare to you that it is His pleasure for you to bruise Satan under your feet shortly, and to bring it to pass any way He sees fit. He can do it because He is the Lord, absolute Lord.
With all of this in our hearts, we must change our thinking. We’ve got to make a decision. Will we go into Babylon saying, “We’re here on a mercy mission. We have crates of orange juice and little bottles of milk to give you, something to sustain you and to keep you alive for a little longer”—or will we sing, as David sang in the Psalm of the exile, “Happy is that one who takes Babylon’s children and dashes them against the rock” (Psalm 137:9). You might say, “How bloody!” No, there are too many things still being born of Babylon. There are too many religious campaigns and enterprises, too many big ego trips, too much commercialism. Do you know what I am referring to? There is too much of that which comes forth just to make money, to merchandise the people of the Lord. There ought to be faith to see us dash every one of those projects against the rock—in a sense, to kill them, to smash and destroy them. There has to be that killer instinct which corresponds to the spirit of the Master when He treads out the winepress of the fierceness of His wrath.
We have a worship for the Lord, but it is the kind of worship that says, “Lord, tell me what to think. Tell me what to feel. I do not exalt my own mind, my own emotions, and my own reactions, so that they sit on the throne; Lord, You sit on the throne. Draw me and I will run after You. Tell me what to be and to do in this day, and that is exactly what I will be and exactly what I will do.”
I have set upon a course to believe that God will soon start breaking down drastically and dramatically, the barriers and the walls. We have walked around them like the Israelites walked around Jericho, but the time will shortly be upon us when we will blow the trumpet in Zion and the walls will fall flat. God is going to deliver Babylon into our hands.
What Babylon or any of the people in it think is not my concern. I have long since refused a defensive position concerning this thinking, but at this particular time my feeling is reaching into something else. I may lose some of you, but if you walk away, you are doing exactly what some of the disciples did in the days when Jesus began teaching them after the great miracle of the loaves and fishes. They walked away saying, “This is a hard saying, who can hear it? Who can listen to this?”
Long before you were born, people turned away by the thousands because God spoke a word and they were not prepared to hear what God was saying, what He was ready to bring forth. Who can hear what God is saying today about what He is ready to do in the earth? Do you think you are superior to people in other generations? They were not prepared to accept it. Are you? How deadly it is when we insist on thinking our own thoughts and following our own conclusions. If we would just relinquish our responses so that all He has to do is to lightly touch us, in order for us to respond exactly the way He wants us to respond.
Perhaps you are thinking, “That sounds like a mechanical man. I don’t want to lose the control over myself.” Well, I do. I want to be His bondservant. I want to be able to stand in the face of all the furies of hell and say, “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” I want to please Him that much. I want to come to the place with all my heart (if I’m not already in it) where I would walk on alone if necessary, rather than turn away from what God has revealed. I will not turn away from it!
Soon the prophecies will come which no longer just stick hat pins in the devil, but which will wield the sword of the Spirit that slices him down and breaks the fetters off God’s people, opening the prison house and letting them surge through in the name of the Lord. It is necessary for this to come speedily and I think it will. I can almost hear the sound of a trumpet off in the distance sounding a cavalry charge. There is a feeling of something pending as though the whole troop of deliverance is about to come galloping around the mountain.
The sign of miracle deliverance is in the earth again. And God is saying, “Bind, and it will be bound; loose, and it will be loosed.” There have been token fulfillments of promises, and a number of things have been happening and unfolding, but God is saying to us, “I am going to do a thing in the earth and it will make the ears of the people in Babylon tingle.” It will be wonderful and I embrace it. Can you receive it? Are your hearts open to believe what I am saying?
When you left Babylon, you left behind some good people who love the Lord with all their heart, yet they are held in bondage because of an oppression on their understanding. They cannot perceive what God is saying or doing. You can’t talk them into it, yet you know they love God. Don’t you think that something has to come as a clarion call, “Come out of Babylon. Come out of Babylon!” This damnable system is holding them as a prey. It possesses them.
With their stupid, satanic system of ethics, they never hold the claim of Christ first. They say, “This is my member, and that is your member.” If there is an exchange of church members, they have official letters of transfer, like a spiritual escrow whereby one pastor owns this soul and another owns that soul. Lord, damn that practice right into the pit of hell! They have bartered and traded the souls of men. God loose His people until they come into the true Church of the Lord Jesus Christ where nobody owns anybody, but the Lord owns all of us, where no one stands in any position except that of a bondservant or handmaiden of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I speak with what could almost be interpreted as a bitterness. I am not bitter about these things, but I do hate them. I hate this Babylonian hypocrisy that still holds people captive and oppresses them. In this Walk, there must never be a hint or a question concerning race, or that damnable practice that puts people in certain categories and deprives some of the rights and privileges enjoyed by others. No sir, that is not going to be! Instead, we bestow even more abundant honor upon the part that lacketh. Those who haven’t had the same chance will have more heaped upon them, as they are brought forth in a loving care. This is right before God. The Word must be preached until we flow together in one Body and come to the place where we see whole segments of our churches lifted up and set here or set there, wherever God says, in order to do the will of the Lord.
How will we recognize the day in which we are really open to do the will of God? If God were to say to some of you, “Here, arise and take fifty of your people and set them right in the middle of Watts and build a New Testament church there and do the will of God,” and you would do it, then we would know that this thing is right before the Lord.
This is not just a test on whites; it is a test on blacks too. Watch them. When they have scrambled out of their oppression, they don’t want to go back and help those who remain. Many who are now prospering and making money are quickly forgetting their own people. That is not unusual nor is it specific to blacks. The Hawaiians forget the Hawaiians. The Filipinos don’t want to go back to the Philippines. No one wants to go back to the pit from which he was digged. If God can help us to build a church even in Sodom and Gomorrah, He can help us to do His will anywhere with all of our hearts. If we can’t see this as a reality, if we can’t even lay down our lives for the brethren, we haven’t made it yet.
I feel these things so deeply, and I know you do too. We want the will of the Lord with all of our heart, but sometimes we are saying yes to something when we don’t know what is really involved or where it is going to lead. We are like the pastor who said, “I didn’t know it was going to be this extensive, or that the price would be this great.” Some of our people have struggled through a long siege and have paid a great price. They will not back off now. They are determined to do the will of the Lord.
God will bring forth the precious fruit of the earth, prophets and apostles, mighty men of God. From every kindred, tongue, and tribe He brings forth a people for His name. The Word says that in this hour there will be no distinction between Greek, barbarian, or Scythian, male or female, bond or free; instead you will all be one in Christ (Colossians 3:11). Notice, however, that this is in Christ. In the world, the backgrounds, the hatreds, the animosities run riot. But when we come into Jesus Christ that all has to end. The enmity is to be broken down, and there is to be a flowing together. There is to be a love, so great that you would even be willing to die for the thing you believe in.
It is not enough to say, “I will wait and see. I will test it out. If it looks good, I’ll buy it. Your heart must be dedicated to say, “If all others go against it, I am still going to believe in it. I predetermine this. It is in my heart to walk in that which God is bringing forth. I will no longer be bound by the reactions and the conditioning of my mind that existed in the past.” This is revolutionary, but we’re not going to reject it. Let it be revolutionary! This I know: we are going to love each other, we are going to walk with each other. Ask the Lord to bless and sanctify to your heart what has come in this message because this message brings with it a wild, almost a vicious, lashing out at the enemy, as we position ourselves, determined to no longer accept unbelief in our heart.
Recently a sarcastic remark was casually made about a word of revelation that had come over someone in personal ministry. I didn’t react to it at first, but later, and even now, I find my heart grieving over it. I reject it. I reject that form of unbelief. You are going to accept what God says over one another. I’ll put up with you. Even when you slip and stumble seven ways, I’ll help you. I’ll pick you up when no one else would have a thing to do with you.
Any time that God gives a word, no one is to reject that word! It doesn’t matter what you think of the individual; you are not to reject God’s word over him. I’m not going to reject the words that have come over you, and you are not to reject the words that have come over me either. Even if a word should come that seems almost ridiculous, as though no one could ever rise to it, forget your doubts. This is the day of the fantastic. Don’t draw away from it. You are never to draw away from a word God has spoken over us. This is one thing we will lock horns over. You accept one another as the Lord has accepted you.
What about people making mistakes and stumbling around? Oh, we have all done that, seventy times seven in one day, but it is all part of the same picture. It is time to move in and claim deliverance, but I can’t claim deliverances for my life and I can’t claim the things I want from God, if I reject one word over any brother. That is where it begins, and that is where it ends.
I would also like to have the Lord bring us to the place where we can accept, more perfectly, even people who have backgrounds that are repulsive to us, that would normally cause us to completely reject them. Can you understand the need for this? We have learned to accept all kinds of things with a growing tolerance, but let’s accept it all. If someone who has tortured and persecuted even the little lambs were to be saved tomorrow, we should rejoice in it. Do you agree with that? If such a one were converted tomorrow, I would accept him with all of my heart. The Saul of Tarsus today can be an Apostle Paul tomorrow.
Paul wrote to those in Corinth about people who had all kinds of things wrong with them.… Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God. I Corinthians 6:9–11. The Corinthian church had the whole scale, all of it, and they walked with God; they became great men of God. We are going to do the same.
As I accept, humbly and without any reservation, what God tells me concerning what I am, and as I see myself as the bondservant of the Lord, I know what I am. I know what He has called me to be. When I see that—truly see it in God—it is not a thing that exalts me, but immediately the light and the revelation of it fill me with burning indignation at two things: that you don’t accept what God says you are and that you may not accept what God says your brother is.
You don’t feel the impact of these two things until God has first dealt with you about the sin of not neglecting what He says concerning you. You see, you are His chosen vessel. He loves you. He has lifted you up. You can’t go around saying, “Well, praise God that He’s met me,” and then still beat yourself down and refuse to accept that all things are possible. If you love Him, all things are possible because you are positioned in Him. When you take the first step and begin to accept yourself and forgive yourself and take the place God has for you, then the next step is that you must immediately be filled with indignation when a brother won’t accept his place, or a brother will not accept another brother’s place.
The secret of accepting your brothers is in first accepting yourself. If I were fearful, there would be a reason for me to reject another, but I am not afraid. I know who I am, I know why I am here, I know what I am doing. I know that God speaks to me. This has taken away from me any fear of my position being lost. I don’t know when I have ever been jealous of another brother’s place. When I see a brother beginning to try to rise in God, I feel a real concern that He make it, that he be just as big as he can be. To every man who works with me, I say, “You don’t have to be jealous and you don’t have to feel that the place God has given me is the place you must have. God gives us each the place He wants us to have, and you are going to have the place that God wants you to have. I will help you to get it, for you will never find me jealous of you. And you are not to tear down anybody else to get a place. Just move right in and stand with me and we will move together.” I have to keep repeating this over and over until people finally come to understand that I mean it. But once they see that it is my true feeling, they never again feel jealous. Instead, they begin to reach out with a freedom and a liberty to be anything God will let them be. They never feel that I am in any way holding them back.
No man who has worked with me has complained that I was breathing down his neck or not trusting him. I give everyone full leeway. If anything, I should perhaps take more of an active hand to help and supervise them. But once God gives them the word, I believe that their initiative should come forth. Don’t ever feel that there is not a big place for you or that you can’t move into any area that God lays upon you, or anoints you to fill, or reveals that you can have. You can have it.
God is working it. Even now He is bringing forth some fantastic men. Within a short time the churches will be in a new era. They will be moving more completely in what has already begun. The people will not be saying, “I’ll find out where Brother Stevens is going to be and go there to hear him.” That situation is going to end. All the churches will be strong healthy churches, based upon congregations that are so dedicated to the Lord that they won’t be like the Corinthian church where they said, “I am of Cephas, I am of Apollos, I am of Paul, I am of Christ.” It is not going to be that way. A rich beautiful word will be flowing everywhere. There will be so many rich ministries in the Word, that you just won’t be able to wait to go to church to see who is going to bring the Word. Let’s believe and release that in the name of the Lord. The quicker it comes, the better.
Are you wondering then what my place will be? I don’t care if I have any place at all. I have had a glorious, glorious privilege. For a quarter of a century God has given to me the principles of the gospel of the Kingdom and I have proclaimed them. If I never preached another word for the rest of my life, I have already had the glorious privilege in the Lord of unearthing, of bringing to light and restoring the principles that belong to the New Testament Church and the restoration. If others took it over and I never did another thing as long as I live, do you think I would be unhappy or sad? I might have a little more rest, I might even go fishing once in a while; and I would be rejoicing in the words that God was bringing forth in the rest of the brethren. I would be in the congregation, rejoicing when a miracle word began to flow because this is the day of a revelation word. This is our position. Do you understand and believe it?
Is this worth living for? Can you feel that dedication, that love for God, that love for His people? Is there a deep anger in your spirit against the things that have held God’s people back? Would you like to contend for the faith that was once delivered to the saints? or would you rather kind of grope around saying, “I don’t know where the power has gone. I don’t know why God doesn’t answer prayer. I don’t know why nothing ever happens.” Which do you want to do? I know what I am doing. I’m contending for that which belongs to a son of God.
When John the Baptist came preaching, everybody wanted to know who he was. Jesus eventually identified him when He said, “This is Elijah who is to come, if you can receive it” (Matthew 11:14). So we know who he really was, but John himself didn’t even know. And I think that was of God. So when they asked him, he did not say, “Yes, I am Elijah.” He said, “I am just a voice crying in the wilderness.”
It is not who is doing the crying that is important, but what is being said. God forbid that any one of us individually become the issue. Don’t create false problems. In this Walk apostleship is not the problem. Whether or not a certain man is an apostle is not the issue. The issue is the Lordship of Jesus Christ over His Church. Recognize what the issue really is. If God shows someone that an individual is an apostle and it is a revelation of the Lord to him, let him accept it and believe it. But that should never be the issue, because that is not the basis of the Walk. The basis of this Walk with God is that He is Lord. He is the Lord, and we are just voices crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”