We have come to the realization that in studying under the Living Word, you can receive more in a short time, than from two or three years in Bible college, in which you will receive a mixture of the true and false, or if they are sound, you are not going to get the meat of the word, the experience you gain from doing the will of God. So much more lasting good is done in your life.
Don’t feel badly if you haven’t been trained in a Bible school. To tell you the truth, this people is better prepared to walk with God than those who have come through seminaries. You know more about what God is doing and saying. There may be technical aspects of some academic subjects that you haven’t learned, but as for the general teaching and the entire theme of the Word of God, and what God is saying out of His Word for us today—you have it.
The principles of homiletics, dealing with the organized delivery of sermons, and that of hermeneutics, the field of interpretation, as they are taught in seminaries, are established on a wrong basis. All the principles of hermeneutics insist that the context of a passage must be considered in order to understand it properly. But that doesn’t hold true. For example, in the Old Testament you will see a little prophecy tucked away in Hosea 11:1, I… called my son out of Egypt. This passage is quoted in Matthew 2:15 as a prophecy telling how Jesus would be taken to Egypt when He was a child—and was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt did I call my son. But the context of the prophecy in Hosea is talking about the time that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and God called them out. By looking only at the context you miss the real meaning of the passage. The rabbis and the fundamentalists with their interpretations don’t realize that God hid things away. Another illustration is the twenty-second Psalm which contains many quotations of Christ on the Cross. There’s no description of the crucifixion like it. The context shows something else completely—that David was in a real kettle of fish and he was crying out to the Lord. But that isn’t what the Holy Spirit was bringing in this Psalm. David was a prophet and even in the midst of his own experiences he was prophesying many things. David actually prophesied more details about the life of Jesus Christ than all the other prophets put together. So hermeneutics and homiletics, as they’re taught, are in error.
In this day there’s only one way to go—that’s the living Word. That was the way the apostles preached and taught. It’s the only way. Forget the seminary academic approach.
If one of you young folks asked me, “How should I train for the ministry?” I would direct you to find a good Hebrew teacher and a good Greek teacher and get the equivalent of at least two years of Hebrew and three or four years of Greek as your academic background. Get a good education, concentrating on subjects of a very practical nature, such as journalism, typing, a good system of bookkeeping, and a good solid year in basic California law. Forget about seminary training. It will not equip you for the things God is leading us into. There is no need to learn about the administration of a Sunday school, because God is leading into something else. It’s just a different season. What about building churches? They’re talking about some monstrosity we’re not interested in. We’re interested in a structure that God is building. What about the different systems of church government? There’s no point in it, because you’re not going to build a church like that anyway. I would spend most of my time on deep exposition of the Scriptures.
Most of the men coming out of the seminary after six or eight years do not even have a working knowledge of the Bible. They’ve been taught everything except how to understand the Scriptures. If a person is going to preach the Word, he should know the Word. It’s rather strange that when you talk to graduates of Bible colleges and seminaries, you realize they have a superficial knowledge of the Word. So I would encourage you to spend your time in the Word. Whatever your calling is, you should spend time in the Word. Another thing—keep growing in the Spirit, but don’t feel that you have to explain every verse of Scripture in the Bible when you read it. The greatest mistake a student can make is to get hung up on a passage he doesn’t understand. Instead, you should constantly apply those passages that you do understand. That’s the only thing you have to worry about where God is concerned. God will never bring you up before the judgment bar and say, “How about these Scriptures you didn’t understand?” That will not count one way or the other. But—“How about the Scriptures that you did understand? What did you do with those?” The thing to do is to seek the Lord and dig into the Word. As you understand more and more of it, just let it feed your heart. Constantly strive for one thing that is important in the ministry now—stay away from the stereotyped, standard, conventional interpretation that you find in all the commentaries, because a new thing is coming in interpretation that is just as real and just as wild as the way the men in the New Testament interpreted the Old Testament. If you read the Old Testament through objectively and then go back to the New Testament and read how they quoted and used the Old Testament, it sort of shocks you, because you realize the Holy Spirit brought the Word with the basic purpose that God had in mind for the Bible: the Bible was not meant as revelation—it was meant as concealed revelation! A sinner who reads the Bible will never be able to understand it. He’ll read through it and find a thousand contradictions. I haven’t seen any for a long time, have you? What’s in the Scriptures?—concealed revelation. And a person preparing for the ministry should understand that. He should constantly seek to deepen his devotional life and his walk with God, his dedication and his worship. The deeper he goes in God, the more the Lord will open the Word to him. It’s progressive in its unfolding. It is concealed revelation.
If you want to be a minister, the Word will have to be unfolded to you before you can unfold it to anyone else. And in order for it to unfold to you, you have to have the walk with God. So the academic side is secondary—the primary requisite is your dedication to the Lord Jesus Christ and coming to grips with the problems you have in walking with God, and coming down to worship the Lord with all your heart. You do that—and the other things will begin to unfold.
We have learned from experience that a person who isn’t open and honest, but tries to hide and cover up a basic weakness or sin in his life, without any repentance, will always be a problem and trouble maker in the church. He will complain, “I can’t feel any signs. I never get any revelation. The Lord never shows me anything.” He doesn’t get any revelation because he isn’t honest in his heart, he has never come to a place of real repentance.
The ministers today try to reconcile themselves to a tremendous amount of unbelief. They’ve been disillusioned by the seminaries. It is difficult to even find a good Greek teacher, for they start tearing the manuscripts down and you have a problem when you see the contradictions and variant readings.
An amazing thing, which not a seminary in the world teaches, is the mathematical structure of the Greek and Hebrew Bible, that can be carried out so beautifully. If a man would learn Greek and spend about a year learning to analyze passages by a mathematical structure, he could become a brilliant student by buying photostatic copies of all the oldest existing manuscripts. With these copies he could look to find that amazing little mathematical structure, and instead of going to higher criticism that finally tears everything down and builds unbelief, he could have the exact words that came by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, and know what the Word taught. That would clear many things up—we are really waiting for it.
We’re still waiting for someone to write a good church history book. What is available is so superficial. When the Bible was written they had a good idea of church history. We find a great deal of duplication in I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles. Why do we have that duplication? Kings is a history from a political viewpoint, while Chronicles is the history emphasizing the spiritual element. Why couldn’t someone who is a prophet of God and also a student write one church history by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, explaining what has happened in history from a spiritual standpoint? All the studies are approaching history more and more from an academic scientific viewpoint of unbelief.
When is the student going to come forth who could write about the “Decline and Rise of the New Testament Church”—to trace how it declined through the years, what it went through, the processes of restoration that have been operative in the world for the last five hundred years, how much was restored, and when? It would be one of the most beautiful things, to have an entire volume dealing with the acceleration of the restoration over the last five hundred years showing how a hundred years would go by with very little restored, then after fifty years another great truth would be coming, etc., until now we’ve had more of the Word of God and the New Testament experiences restored since 1900, than we have had in the preceding five hundred years. Basically, what was restored before 1900 was justification by faith, the born again experience (and that on a small scale in many groups); we have had a leaning toward the missionary idea of evangelizing the world; we have had an erroneous teaching of holiness come up, which was not understood correctly and so it was abused and turned aside; and there has been very little teaching on the second coming of the Lord. Since 1900 the great breakthrough has come in teaching the return of the Lord and the end time events. The baptism of the Holy Spirit came in restoration in Los Angeles around 1906. Within the last twenty-five years has come the wholesale teaching of the gifts, but only in the last few years has there been any practicing of the gifts or understanding of them. New Testament church order has come to be understood during the last sixty years. Things have accelerated so rapidly that almost all of the restoration truths have been restored within the last seventy years. If you go to a seminary or Bible school, none of this is taught to you. This gives you a glimpse of what it is all about, so you can walk in it—that is important.
Wouldn’t it be worthwhile for us to train a man here and send him out to pastor a church? Then on his own he could procede to study Greek and Hebrew through some school where it is available. Incidentally, one of the best places to study a language is in a good Roman Catholic University, under a carefully selected professor. I studied Greek at the University of Dayton under a teacher who had trained for eight years to be a priest and had become a brilliant man in the ancient languages. He knew much about languages from a fundamental viewpoint. This was an accelerated course during the war when they had stepped up the semesters so that we had to cover a lot of ground in one year. We reviewed basic Greek grammar and then we had to translate an epitome or summary of one account of all the stories in the gospels, but without duplication. There was still time left over, so he took us through modern Greek and some classical Greek to show the difference between that and the koine Greek of the New Testament, and how the language had changed in modern times. Then we had to translate a number of chapters out of other texts to learn the difference between classical Greek and the New Testament Greek. All of that we did in first year Greek. That’s why I recommend a good Catholic University to study languages.
We’re facing the fact that there will be a thousand churches out here to be pastored. If a man wants to go into full time ministry, one of the things he should do is to write to the government printing office and get a survey of all existing jobs and professions and their demands, to find a good paying job with the maximum amount of personal liberty and freedom; then study it over and work to get it. Paul was a tent maker, and was able to make enough money to support the apostolic company that was going with him, and yet he was spending most of his time in the ministry. Every single boy in the New Testament times was trained in a profession or trade, and that’s the way every minister should be trained. He should be ready to work with his hands, because there will be times of persecution when churches will be closed for months, and then what will he do for a living? He must be able to fit into the economy. Everyone who wants to have any part in the ministry now should be trained and have experience in survival. They should be able to go out into the wilderness and survive, because the time will come that the whole economic system will be so geared that they won’t be able to buy or sell, and they will have to know how to get along. If we continue what God first showed us to do, all of the people should be divided into areas and the elders assigned over them in case the church had to go underground suddenly. It could happen right here in the United States very quickly.
This is the kind of training that a minister should be given now, and this makes obsolete almost everything you might have been thinking about in a seminary; but it would prepare men and enable them to walk with God through the time that is coming.
The basic weakness and fault of the average seminary or Bible college is that it gives no training at all about knowing the voice of the Lord. The one thing a minister should know above anything else is the leading of the Lord. I have yet to see on the curriculum one course that would prepare or train people to know the leading of the Spirit or the voice of the Lord. Waiting on the Lord is absolutely not in the picture. Instead of that they give a great many courses in psychology and things of that nature. The counseling they are trained to give is such that it is usually disastrous for a Christian couple who consults them. How do we counsel? By the wisdom of the Lord and the Word of God. How are we going to deliver people? By the power of God. How are we going to guide a church? By the leading of the Holy Spirit. We’ll get to the place where all things of administration go back to the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s more important that you should know, not administration, but the Administrator Himself—know His voice and let Him lead you.
Actually the time you spend here is time in the ministry, because this is a ministering body. Twenty years ago when hands were laid on me, God said that by the word of wisdom and the word of knowledge I would lead and teach the people and bring them into what God had for them. That’s better than anything else could be.
A man who was trained in the seminary would shake in his boots if some one suggested that he go out and start his own church. Yet here we have an elder, trained to be an engineer, who has three little churches going, and he’s a better pastor any day of the week than you can produce under the old denominational order.
You don’t know how many disillusioned ministers there are. So few of them are really happy. They’re constantly on the defensive, for the Babylonian structure takes a man of God and nails him to the wall, and puts pressure on him that is often unbearable. They get bogged down with details and endless committee meetings.
This New Testament church isn’t dependent on one man, but on Body ministry. It isn’t built on a structure of man’s organization. It’s a whole new living thing built on the Lord. This is an entirely different day. Some of you do not yet understand what you are in, and how good it really is. God has built this church. There are girders of steel under it. Don’t pay any attention to what you see on the outside—there’s something real under it.
Get as good an education as you can, because there is still a great premium on a degree in this country, and in foreign countries it will be possible to get in as educators, whereas at times they may not let the ministry in. Also, the discipline of study will do you good, even if you never use your calculus and trigonometry, etc. Also, we will need good well-trained teachers when we get our own school system. By having the basic requirements from there we will double and triple it in certain areas. There will be emphasis on teaching an ability to read, to analyze, to comprehend and retain, because we’re going to have more books that could actually prepare and teach people for a whole new line of ministry. So get your education, do the very best you can.