we don't bring any honor to God by making ourselves less than who He says we are.
You know, there can be, when we make a statement like we're the greater people on the earth,
that can sound weird on a number of levels. But I think we get into this false piety
where, well, I'm just little old me, and I'm needy, and I'm just crushed and broken,
and I can't, you know, Scripture says that we can do nothing apart from Him. You know,
we all know that one. But we emphasize that when He also says, I can do all things through Christ
who strengthens me. So yes, we can do nothing apart from Jesus, but the good news is we're
not apart from Him and don't ever intend to be.
Well, welcome back to Kingship Reformation. Today we're on class number six, and the title is
Greater People and Greater Works. So just as a point of quick review, you know, we've been
talking about this fact that Jesus redeemed us, not to get us off the earth, but He redeemed us
and made us kings and priests to reign on the earth. And we've been looking at the storyline
on a pretty high level of the narrative of the kingdom of God on earth. And, you know, it's true,
we really have been cast into a story fit for kings. Now, largely we've been sold a lesser
story, and I think that's why we haven't lived as kings. We've kind of lived as escapists,
and anything in between. But that's changing. As I said, I believe we're in a kingdom awakening
and a kingship reformation of believers. And I'm starting to hear more and more, I'm hearing more
and more preachers around the country and around the world that are picking up on this. And I
really do believe it's a move of the spirit in our time. So kingship reformation is about
discovering and engaging in our kingly role in His great story. So the last class we focused on
how the kingdom actually grows and transforms the earth. And so in summary, Jesus plants the
sons of the kingdom in the earth. That was taken from the parable of the wheat and tares in Matthew
13. You know, we grow alongside of the tares. And so that was a key point of growing up. We act as
leaven mixed into the dough. You know, one of the versions of that parable of the leaven
is that it's mixed into all throughout until the whole loaf rises. So we function as salt in
the earth. You know, Jesus said, you are the salt of the earth. And salt is mainly a preservative.
But I just said here that we function as salt, preserving and flavoring life on the planet.
So we shine as light in the darkness. You know, we're not the light that people, we want people
to come out of the darkness and into our light meetings. We want to be light that penetrates
darkness in the spheres of influence. And the way we do that is by the way we work, really the
way we work out our salvation. Jesus said, let your light so shine. And that so means, it's not
like saying, let your light shine so much. It's like, let your light in this manner, let it so
shine. How? Jesus, that men would see your good works. They'd see the way you work. They'd see
the way life is supposed to work. And that shines light in a dark room. And they stop stumbling over
ridiculous ideologies that we hear promoted by the world so much. So in summary, the kingdom
of God on earth grows through the intricate and intimate involvement of God's kingdom people who
are planted in the world. We're not of the world, but we've been planted in it. And that's God's
glorious plan. So the days of disengagement and withdrawal from the earth and looking forward to
getting off the earth are over. I'm officially declaring those days over. So today I want to
talk about in this class, greater people, greater work. So greater people, where do I get that
expression? First of all, I just want to say, we are the greater people. If you're a child of God,
from the lips of Jesus, Matthew 11, 11, Jesus says, when he's talking about John the Baptist,
he says, assuredly, I say to you, among those born of women, there has not risen one greater
than John the Baptist. Now let that sink in for a minute. That's, you know, his, his, his hearers of
that when he first said that had to be like, you know, going through their Rolodex in their mind
of all the people in the Old Testament of coming on David, Daniel, Joshua, Moses. And Jesus is
saying assuredly that of all those people prior, there's not one greater than John. But then he
blows our mind and says this directly to us, but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater
than he, greater than John. So you do the math on that. We don't bring any honor to God by making
ourselves less than who he says we are. You know, there can be, when we make a statement like we're
the greater people on the earth, that can sound, that can sound weird on a number of levels, but
I think we get into this false piety where, well, I'm just little old me and I'm needy,
and I'm just crushed and broken. And I can't, you know,
scripture says that we can do nothing apart from him. You know, we all know that one.
But we emphasize that when he also says,
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
So yes, we can do nothing apart from Jesus,
but the good news is we're not apart from him
and don't ever intend to be.
So what does scripture say about us?
Psalm eight, four through six
is one of the most mind boggling scriptures.
Old Testament, so I believe talking about man at large,
not just redeemed man.
What is man that you take thought of him
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than Elohim
and you crown him with glory and majesty
and you make him to rule over the works of your hands.
You have put all things under his feet.
Now you should just really spend some time meditating
on every one of those little phrases in that scripture,
but this is what God says about us, who we are.
I'll give an example of our greatness
as applied to a particular area.
Let's call it prayer.
So James 5, 16 and 18 says,
the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man
avails much.
I wanna point out, it says a righteous man there.
It doesn't say if I can fill up the stadium
with believers crying out for a particular thing,
then maybe I'll hear from heaven.
Now I love corporate prayer and I love stadium gatherings
and I'm not knocking that,
but James literally says here
that the effective fervent prayer
of a righteous man avails much.
And I'm really glad he didn't stop there
because we would downgrade it.
But he goes on to says,
Elijah was a man with a nature like ours
and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain
and it did not rain on the land
for three years and six months.
And then he goes on to say,
he prayed again and the heavens gave the rain.
The point is this,
I believe that the Holy Spirit through the writer,
through James was indicating,
in case people are wondering what I mean
by what a righteous man can avail in prayer,
I'm gonna set a pretty high bar here and say,
Elijah, this old covenant guy
actually called for the rain to stop.
In fact, I've written the scripture here,
first Kings 17, one, this is actually,
cause I wanted to look it up.
Where did Elijah actually pray for it not to rain?
So I went back to first Kings 17, one,
and this is what Elijah says to Ahab, the king,
as the Lord God of it,
this is called confidence by the way,
in your relationship with God,
as the Lord God of Israel lives before whom I stand,
there shall not be due nor rain these years,
except at my word.
Okay, that's a kingly prayer right now.
And again, we've been redeemed to be kings and priests.
This is what we ought to have as a target
for the way we pray as the ecclesia of God.
So I would just say, have we the church,
have we even begun to grasp,
much less walk in the reality of these truths?
I believe the days are coming,
I don't know how far down the road it'll be,
but when walking in this greatness
will be normal for the saints.
These things right now have a cognitive dissonance to them
because we haven't really been given a,
again, that story that requires that kind of faith
or that kind of greatness,
but it really is God who says these things about us.
So we are the greater people
and I just don't take my word for it,
take Jesus's word for it.
And then I wanna talk about the greater works
and I get, I draw that phrase from John 14, 12,
where Jesus says, most assuredly, I say to you,
he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will do.
If he stopped right there, it'd be an awesome,
it would be an awesome declaration or promise.
But he says, and greater works than these,
he will do because I go to my father.
And again, you just have to meditate.
We have to renew our minds to this truth
because it's not something you get right away,
but he said, me leaving because I leave,
it's going to facilitate or empower
or enable greater works to be done
by those who believe in him.
So what is the causal relationship
between Jesus's leaving earth
and our being able to do the greater works?
And of course, the first answer we all would give,
and it's, I believe, mostly true.
It's true, but it's only part of the story
and that's the Holy Spirit was poured out
when Jesus went to the father,
then the spirit was poured out
and the spirit that was with them,
as he told his followers and now be in us.
So the indwelling spirit of God, I mean, that's awesome.
So that empowers us to do the works of Jesus.
That would speak to our ability to do more works
than Jesus did because he was limited by the human body
he chose to travel around in when he was on the earth.
But Jesus didn't just say, you do more works.
He said, you do greater works.
And that's a qualitative statement,
not a quantitative statement.
So what is this relationship between Jesus leaving?
And I believe it's right at the heart.
It's right at the core of this kingship reformation
and this kingdom of God awakening.
When Jesus ascended to the father,
he ascended to receive his kingdom.
It was his coronation, his crowning moment.
We have the parable of,
Now, a man goes to a faraway land to receive a kingdom,
and then he comes back, and he asks his people,
his servants, to give an account.
But probably the most stunning picture of this ascension,
what Jesus ascended to do, is Daniel 7, 13 to 14.
I'll just read that.
I was watching in the night visions,
and behold, one like the Son of Man,
coming with the clouds of heaven, by the way,
he came to the Ancient of Days, and they
brought him near before him.
Then to him was given dominion, and glory, and a kingdom,
that all people's nations and languages should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away in his kingdom, the one which
will not be destroyed.
So when Jesus redeemed us and received his kingdom,
he made us kings and priests to reign on the earth.
This is why I believe he says we do the greater works because he
went to the Father, because he went to become the king.
He did not walk on the earth as a king.
He walked on the earth as the Lamb of God.
Now he's seated at the right hand as the king,
as the lion of the tribe of Judah.
So he said that Jesus said he was going to build his church.
This is Matthew 16.
He's going to build his ekklesia,
and that this is his legislative body.
We've talked about that.
The Greek word for church there is ekklesia.
It's a legislative body.
He's going to build his legislative body
on the earth, which the gates of hell would not prevail against.
So what are the greater works that Jesus did not do?
So it's very interesting.
So in Luke chapter 4, this is when Jesus stood up
in the synagogue, and he read the following passage
from the prophet Isaiah.
And I'm just going to read Isaiah 61, 1 through 2a.
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news
to the afflicted.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and freedom to the prisoners,
and to proclaim the favorable year or the year of jubilee,
favorable year of the Lord.
Then when he closed the book and sat down,
he said, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
What was he saying to them by looking for
and reading this particular passage out of Isaiah?
This was a turning point,
one of many turning points in his ministry.
He was telling them point blank in the synagogue
that he is the anointed one of whom Isaiah prophesied.
And the way he's validating that statement
is these are the works that I do,
because they've seen him preaching good news
of the afflicted and binding up the brokenhearted,
proclaiming liberty to the captives,
healing the sick, raising the dead.
All the individual works Jesus did validated
that he actually was the one.
And this was him standing up and saying,
I am here, I am he.
So the works that he referred to in this Isaiah 61, 1 and 2,
they're redemptive works to individuals,
if you'll notice that.
We the redeemed, the people of God,
we continue doing these works as well, as Jesus said we would.
He said, the works I do, you will do.
So I think we get that.
I think, of course, there are still whole sections
of the church that don't believe in the power of miracles today,
don't believe in all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
That's called cessationism.
And I'm not even going to grant that the time
to address it with this crowd.
But we still do the works that Jesus did.
And we've been doing them.
And I think we're going to be doing more of them.
And I think we're going to be doing them more powerfully.
But they're still the works Jesus did,
which are the redemption aimed towards individuals.
But the Isaiah 61 passage goes on from that place
where Jesus stopped his reading to speak about additional works
being done.
This is mind-boggling here.
So I'm going to read it, Isaiah 61, 3b through 4.
It says, so they will be called the oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he, God, may be glorified.
Then they will rebuild the ancient ruins.
They will raise up or restore the former devastations.
And they will repair the ruined cities and the desolations
of many generations.
Now, notice that the works in this Isaiah passage,
they've progressed from works of personal redemption, which,
again, are the ones Jesus stood up and read and said,
today this is fulfilled in your hearing.
So they progressed from personal redemption
to cultural reformation.
And I believe personally that this
is what Jesus meant by the greater works.
Notice who's doing these works of reformation
in the Isaiah passage.
It's the redeemed.
It's the planting of the Lord.
Frankly, it's the ones that the redemptive works
were first performed on.
It was we that were in prison and have been set free.
It's we that were lost, but now we're found.
We were blind, but now we see.
And he doesn't give a pause there.
He doesn't say, and then they're put in a holding pattern
until the anointed one returns to earth
and starts fixing the earth.
There's no pause there. It says,
then they will be called the oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord.
Then they will rebuild, restore, and repair.
So these are works of cultural reformation.
And it's the redeemed that are doing those.
So we're doing these works, again,
John 14, 12 said, because he goes to the Father.
So he's gone to the Father to be enthroned
as the King of kings, having redeemed us
and made us kings and priests to reign on the earth.
So the bottom line here, I believe,
is that we, the redeemed kings and priests,
are doing the works of personal redemption that Jesus did.
But we're also doing, and we're called to do,
the greater works of reformation under the crowned headship
of the reigning King Jesus.
You know, he's really a king.
He's sitting on a real throne.
It's not ethereal.
It's not just an interior thing.
The kingdom of God is within us.
It starts there.
It gets planted in us.
But then he plants us in the earth, and he says,
now you reign and rule on the earth.
So Jesus didn't do these greater works while on earth,
because as Ephesians 1, 22 says, he's now,
as he's been ascended, he has been given as head
over all things to us, to the church, which
is his body, the fullness of him who fills all and in all.
So folks, this is the kingship reformation.
These passages, I believe, are going
to become more and more familiar to us.
And we're going to begin to get a vision, a picture,
beyond the, I believe, shrunken version
of the kingdom of God and Christianity
in general that most of us have been raised
under for the last 150 years.
Nobody here is any older than that.
I'm probably the closest.
But I think we're in for some exciting times
and just really looking forward to exploring, you know,
how do we reign and rule?
You know, how do the saints, as kings and priests,
reign and rule on the earth?
I think we'll spend the rest of our lives mining that out
and walking in that.
And so just welcome to the kingship reformation.
And thanks for being with me for this class.
And we will see you on the next class.