The Demonstration Of The Spirit

Let's lift our bibles up, as we usually do, and wave our bibles around and make Jesus glad and the devil mad.

And let's say this together Say heavenly father, I've tuned in on purpose tonight because I am hungry and thirsty for more of you.

That means more of the word and more of the spirit.

I have to have both and I want more of both.

Open my heart to receive those things that I need to grow and to develop.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Let's turn in our bibles to 1 Corinthians, chapter two, and I'll read from verse one Paul is writing to the church in Corinth and he says that I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God, but I determined not to go anything among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.

And my speech and my preaching were not with enticing words of man's wisdom or the margin says persuasive eloquence, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

And so tonight I wanted to share a message entitled the demonstration of the spirit, and you may recognize that I've preached this not that long ago it's been about six months ago.

Matter of fact, it was a Sunday night.

I've had this in my spirit now for a while and I wanted to visit this subject again on Wednesday night, specifically because we don't have in-person services and so it's a little more difficult to have what I'm preaching on Wednesday night.

But I wanna start having it more on Sunday night and Sunday morning and you can have what you preach.

And part of this message is some things that you can do to enhance the subject of demonstration.

And that word demonstration of the spirit is used only one time in the Bible and yet it was a major part of the early church ministry.

If you take away the demonstration of the spirit from the preaching and teaching of the apostles, if it had just turned into a teaching session just like Sunday school or something like that.

But no, every time they preached and every time they taught, miracles came into being, and that's demonstration.

And that word demonstration is the Greek word apodexus and it's from a root that means showing off, to show off.

We could say it's showings off of the Holy Ghost.

You know, the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed.

The Holy Spirit is not shy, but he does wait to see if anyone will give him place, and first of all, the preacher's gotta give him place.

I mean, if the preacher's just gonna preach this message, it's gonna be point A, point B, one, two, three.

This is how it's gotta be.

Well, you know, the Holy Spirit can't get a word in edgewise, and so it's taken me a lot of years to learn how to preach along with the Holy Ghost and let him and lean on him.

And I constantly do beforehand, before I get to church, I constantly remind him it's him that's doing the work, and but on the other side there's other things that you have to do.

I wanna talk about that a little bit.

But showings off of the Spirit, in other words the glory of God in demonstration, see, I mean that's when miracles occur, that's the glory of God.

You know, some miracles are not instant, sometimes it's over time.

Thank God for those.

But I believe we're coming into the church age, at the very end of the church age, and I believe, just like Brother Hagin prophesied years and years ago and I've heard others, I've heard Brother Copeland prophesy something similar, brother Robert said something similar, that the gifts of the Spirit are the gifts of the Spirit, and the gifts of the spirit is demonstration of the spirit.

I mean, when you have a gift of the spirit operating, that's a demonstration that the spirit of God is there.

And so I believe in the last days the miracles and signs and wonders are gonna be even greater levels than they were in the book of Acts.

And that just makes sense, because this is just about time to wind things up and God is gonna pull out all the stops.

He's gonna show himself alive to this generation before he comes again, and so the church has to do its part.

The church has to be ready.

So Paul said that he used the demonstration of the spirit and depended on it so that his audience would have faith in the power of God and not so much faith in the wisdom of man.

You know, I've been in services where I don't believe there's any way I could have touched the eloquence, the kind of delivery, the hominutics, the all of the fancy preaching A lot of times without the Holy Ghost.

I call that fluff and bluster.

It's kind of a mocking term, I guess, but I mean that's not what your faith is looking to.

Hang your hat, so to speak, on God's presence.

That's undeniable.

And then you know that the Word has been confirmed.

You know, jesus said, you know, and the Bible says that the apostles went everywhere preaching the Word and the Holy Spirit, confirming the Word, with signs following.

So we depend on that so that people's faith is in the right place.

They're not in the personality of the preacher, but it's in the wisdom of God.

Amen, the power of God.

And so the Word and the Spirit brings growth and glorifies God.

I like 2 Corinthians 12.

Turn over there quickly, keep your place there.

At 1 Corinthians, and Paul is talking again.

He wrote them another letter and he is stressing the office that he stood in and he said in verse 12, truly, the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience.

So you notice he started with patience.

It took patience because?

Why?

Well, because that audience he's talking to man.

They were a hard case.

They had a lot of sin in that church.

They had a lot of idolatry.

That city came out of idolatry, false idols that they worshiped, the occult.

They had a lot of leftover problems from that life, even after they got saved.

They had all these bad habits and so forth and they had a lot of sin and so he had to have patience, number one on the list.

And then he said, in all patience and signs and wonders, and my deeds praise God.

Those were the signs of an apostle, and I believe in these last days coming into the kind of iniquity that we have in our society, the kind of callousness, the kind of doubt and unbelief, the kind of mockery that people have for the things of God.

It was on the news tonight.

I haven't verified it, but people are noticing a vast difference in church attendance.

It's down.

Well, that wouldn't surprise me, especially in some parts of the country where they just now have a lot of church attendance, in some parts of the country where they just now got started up with person to person services after months and months of having online.

I predicted this that a lot of churches would never be the same, and about 20% of churches didn't even open up.

They failed their bankrupt, they had to close their doors.

Why?

Because there's no in person.

Listen, this is a hands on type of deal here.

You've got to have fellowship of the saints, you've got to have.

You know.

You have to get together and look at each other and hold each other accountable and love on each other in a personal way, and this whole thing has been about distancing and putting a mask on.

It's been a total antithesis to the way we do church.

That's why we didn't participate so well, we're coming into the time when, I believe, the signs of an apostle, the signs of God, preaching gospel, preaching ministers, is going to increase.

So back to what I began with about the demonstration.

We can either help or hinder demonstration.

It's not all up to me.

Certainly there's a load on me if I approach nighttime callously and I don't prepare, I don't pray, I don't dedicate myself to finding out what it is.

The Spirit of God wants to communicate.

Well then, yeah, he won't show up to add his amen to what I'm saying, he will not show up to confirm what I'm preaching, and so I've got something to do with it.

The worship team yes, they have something to do with it.

They sort of set the table.

If they, you know they're very particular about what type of songs they sing, what the words are.

There's almost no song that they sing that they don't have to change some of the lyrics and it takes a lot of time to add a new song because some of the new songs, the bridge, will be good, but then the chorus is not that great.

It's not what we believe, word of faith.

You know this begging God.

You know I was lost, you know I didn't know what to do.

Well, we don't sing like that.

That doesn't bring the crowd up, that doesn't elevate Jesus.

So we're real particular about the music.

The wrong music can grieve the spirit to begin with, and then you don't have any demonstration been on.

But then the last part is you and you and the congregation I mean you have a whole.

You've probably got more to do with it than the other two put together and that is how you respond, how you respond in praise and worship, how do you, how you respond during the preaching, how do you respond during prayer time?

If you're kind of just just punching the time clock, you're just here to fulfill an obligation, well then, the spirit of God may not show off for you, he may not show off for anybody.

He may, he may exit, and so we have to have an atmosphere that's conducive for the spirit of God to bring forth the miracle signs and wonders that he wants to bring.

So so will you respond, will you yield?

Another word of respond is to yield.

Another word yield yourself and let him show you.

I mean, some people are still so, so shy, they don't get their hands above shoulder.

You know, lift your hands, lift holy hands of Bible says participate, sing, clap, dance, do it, do something to participate.

That's responding.

When the preaching is going on, say amen, engage.

We're not the kind of church at silent we have shouting not over me, don't shout over me.

But you know, every now and then it's something you know hits a high note.

It's, it's, it's right, it's orderly and it's part of response.

It will bring demonstration.

Or will you resist again, resisting or staying in the comfort zone?

Well, I'm, you know, I'm not used to that.

We'll get used to something different program.

You know you can, you can, you can be different.

I came out of the Catholic church we weren't allowed to even talk.

If you turned around and talked to the neighbor behind you, I mean, you know the nun might come up and wrap your knuckles with a ruler.

I was not used to loud church, I mean, I wouldn't have used to talking at all, you know, and so I had an adjustment to make.

So demonstration, pastor, I'm still not sure what you're talking about?

What do you mean?

Well, demonstrations come, comes in two, two ways it's physical and spiritual.

Now, let me, let me make something clear about a physical demonstration.

Physical demonstration has behind it it was ordered by the spirit.

In other words, it's a response of the spirit.

It's not just something, some kind of a physical thing that people do to be to show off.

That's not, that's not what I'm talking about, but physical demonstration and spiritual demonstration.

So, for instance, you know revivals that God has given the church over these last 2000 years.

I think one of the major revivals that the church had was during Martin Luther's time, the revival of the doctrine of salvation by grace alone.

There was a revival in the church and there was a huge split and Protestants broke off from the Roman church and there was, there was a big split.

Why was there a split?

Well, because the Roman church had been corrupted and had drifted away from the gospel and a bishop by the name of Martin Luther, who was the founder of Lutheran churches back then, and he was not a perfect person, he was virulently anti-Semitic, he's got the most vile anti-Semitic writings and yet God used him to bring the church back and its doctrine to salvation by faith alone, by grace, through faith alone and not by works.

And but there's been many other doctrines and demonstrations and even the five-fold ministry offices that have been added in revivals, and I'll give you some examples of each of these.

Like in the 40s and 50s the church had, you had the healing.

Revival came with great tent revivals of people like Oral Roberts and others that had these huge tents, some of them seating 10,000 people.

They traveled all over the country and the churches by and large were not open to them coming to their church because they didn't agree with the doctrine.

And that's exactly why God had to work around the church, because the church had backslid since Pentecost.

The Pentecostal revival was at the turn of the century and that renewed the baptism in the Holy Ghost.

That renewed healing about 1900, 1906.

But then by the 1920s and 30s a lot of that was lost.

You had sectarianism, denominationalism.

People built fences around the doctrine we're the only ones that are saved, everybody else is going to hell.

We're the only ones that's got the real.

The others are fake.

So there was all this division.

You know a whole war was fought over the anointing and so you know God had to send another group in the 40s and 50s to bring a fresh move of God and people by the thousands got healed and then they also got saved.

So it was great revival.

In the 60s you had the charismatic revival where denominational churches experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

I wish I could lay my hands on some of these books that I used to have.

I used to be in charge of the book table at the Full Gospel Businessmen and we had a number of little books, many books, and for each denomination it would say the works of the Holy Ghost and the Church of Christ.

You'd open the book and it'd give you testimony of people that were Church of Christ.

When a Church of Christ is real straight-laced they're not anything like I mean they typically do not believe in that, but you know their members got baptized in the Holy Ghost anyway.

During the 60s there was a move of God in the Catholic Church, the disciples of Christ even they had a move of God.

And all the Church, methodists, lutheran Baptist, all the churches had a move of God where people, members of those denominations, got what is called Pentecost, they got the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

So that was a revival.

And then the seven is.

You had a revival of the teacher.

You know there's a apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher.

Well, the teacher had been kind of not well put together.

And during the 70s the teaching gifts started to expand and you saw churches and they wouldn't even call themselves churches, they'd be called Faith Center, faith Revival Center, they would be called, they would be teaching centers.

And then in the 80s you had the prophetic started adding and you had much of the rise of the prophet and much teaching on the prophet and a lot of error was taught about the prophet Again, because people get off of the word and get over into the gifts alone.

We still need the word.

And then in the 90s you had the same thing with the apostle and the apostolic rose up.

The real rose up and then the fake rose up.

You had fake prophets.

You had fake false apostles, false prophets, false teachers.

You had the see the devil.

Only he only copies what's true and what's real, there's.

No, you know, they don't counterfeit $3 bills.

$3 bills don't exist, so you don't find any.

And the same with the devil he doesn't counterfeit anything unless it's real.

That's real to have the apostle, prophet, the Andrews, pastor, teacher.

And so during the part of this.

There were emphasis on these things, along with different doctrines that were revived by the Holy Ghost, and also, during the 1990s, there was the physical manifestations will add it back in and some of those had wane.

What are we laughing?

Holy laughter.

You ever heard of holy laughter?

Well, you know we have holy laughter in this church from time to time.

We don't try to make it happen, we can't.

It's not something we can, just will.

But we can yield.

We can yield to the spirit and sometimes he'll just give us such joy.

You know, the kingdom of God is not a meat and drink, but it's righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy ghost, joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Peter said and so that's scriptural to to have joy and laughter.

And uh.

And so during the 1990s, you know you had, you had people running, you know, running the aisles.

You know you had people uh twirling and they're, you know they're.

You know they would dance, but they can't dance, so they're just out twirling around in the aisles and we've even had people rolling.

Now I guess we're holy rollers, get their name.

That was a genuine uh manifestation, a physical manifestation of the spirit of God.

Yeah, it can be done in the flesh.

You know, a lot of times churches, they put the clamps down on these manifestations because, well, we don't want that.

That's a lot of that is just flesh.

Well, how do you know?

I mean, I'd rather have a little wildfire than no fire, and uh, I just think that I think I like to err on the side of freedom, you know.

And so, uh, in 1988, my wife and I Gladys now went to a friend of ours was having her first ministry meeting.

She had formed a ministry and she was a traveling preacher and she invited us to come.

Of course, we'd known her for a while, she was a good lady and uh, and so we went to an afternoon meeting, a Saturday afternoon and, uh, I won't go through the whole thing, but during that service, gladys and I were sitting off to the side, right on the front row, on the side, and the speaker was here, but he was down in the audience laying hands on people during altar call and he had just laid hands on us and, uh, we are ever, we never would go up for an altar call, but he, he called everybody.

That's a little weary.

Any of you need strength.

Any of you need, you know, some physical strength, you're just tired.

Well, we, we've been working real hard.

We went up for that and so we got back to our seat and he was ministering to people and both of us started laughing, we giggled and before we knew it we were both on the floor rolling and laughing.

It just couldn't contain our laughter, tears coming out our face, our jaws are cramping.

We saw a couple that we knew and they were pointing that as laughing at us and that made us laugh all the more.

It must have lasted like 15 or 20 minutes, finally got ourselves composed and I mean we were so tired we had to go home and go to bed and talk about tired, but uh, but it was some most exhilarating.

I experienced it for the first time and many times since then I learned how to yield to the spirit of God when the spirit is moving in that way.

You know it'd be, it'd be wrong to yield to a spirit if it's not moving in that way.

And then I think about another physical manifestation years ago at Lakewood church in 1992.

I was, uh, you know, during those years I was opening the services in prayer, closing the services in prayer, so I was up and down the platform.

Sometimes I'd received the offering.

This was a Sunday night and the worship team was up there.

Brother Osteen was already up on the platform and he was trying to get started with his message and and and there was just an exuberance in the room and and every time that the the worship team would die down from what they were playing.

They were playing an upbeat, happened to be playing an upbeat song, not a slow song, but an upbeat song and people were really just rejoicing and I saw myself running and then, about the time I was going to take the next day, I was going to take off they went back down.

Brother Osteen was trying to get control of the service and go ahead and move on and start speaking.

And then I said to the Lord, I said well, and I missed it, but I said, if you let it come back up again, I'll run.

Well, it came back up.

I mean people just kept shouting and they started back up on the music and then I hit the aisle and I ran all the way around the lower floor of that big building and that's a long.

I mean that's a long way to run.

I remember the ushers got out in the aisle.

I think they thought about stopping me, but I was running full speed and my coat was flapping out like that I was, so I was laughing at the same time as running full.

I'm full speed.

I'm not jogging now, I'm running as fast as my legs would carry me.

And so they looked at me and they got out of my way, thank God, and I went all the way around.

When I got back to my chair, I wasn't even breathing hard.

I never lost my breath and I almost fell out when I realized that, like the prophet Elijah, the hand of the Lord had come upon me to help me.

That's never happened again after that.

I mean, it was absolutely supernatural, where God had to show me listen, if you yield to me, then you can add that service will go up to another level.

That's my point.

The point is not Griner is making a lap around the building, the group.

The point is Griner yielded to the spirit doing something supernatural, and the whole spirit and the whole place went up in atmosphere.

Are you with me now?

And so, when, the, when, the, when the service was over well, it was, you know.

I was called up to end the service in prayer and I closed in prayer and I took the microphone, put it into place and turned around and I heard my name, john Walter, and there's only a certain segment of my family that calls me by both names, you know, and I always know what part of the family they're from.

Well, this, this lady, is not really a cousin, she's a cousin of a cousin, so she's not really blood related.

But she said I thought that was you and I said, well, you got to see something.

Wow, what brings you to Lakewood?

I knew she was new age.

You know she's not, she goes to a new age church and so, and she said, well, the bankers are having a convention this week and I have two of my friends, and there was two men with her and they were grinning, you know, they were just looking at each other and me and grinning and I said, well, what did you think of all that specter?

I said, oh, we loved it.

Well, it was really worth coming over here.

I'm so glad, you know, they were just blown away by the Holy Ghost and by Brother Osteen's message and the whole thing.

Oh, thank God for the demonstration of the spirit.

Let's, let's just hire it.

Let's have more of it.

I'm preaching this on Wednesday night when you're not here.

Maybe we can't really have a lot of demonstration like that over live stream, but I'm willing to have anything he'll give us.

But I really my aim is that I want to prepare Glorious Way Church for the days ahead where the Holy Ghost is going to have more and more to say about what we're doing, not only Sunday nights but Sunday morning too.

So so then we get into the spiritual manifestations, and there's lots of physical manifestations and again it's all about yielding.

So it's not about dancing or running or anything like that particularly, but it's obeying and yielding to the spirit.

That's the key to the physical.

Now, the spiritual manifestations are listed in 1 Corinthians 12.

They're the nine gifts of the spirit and we can commonly divide them into three groups of three each.

So the vocal gifts, you know, the gift of prophecy, the gift of tongues and interpretation of tongues those three are the vocal gifts.

It's been said, and I believe it's true, that the vocal gifts are the doorway into the rest of the gifts.

If you stifle the vocal gifts, you don't allow for them, you don't have them for whatever reason, then you're gonna stifle all the gifts, you're gonna stifle the Holy Spirit Himself, and there's gonna be less and less demonstration, there's gonna be less and less miracles, less and less confirmation of the Word.

I mean, it's just you're plugging the blessing spout Amen, like when we had that freeze a few weeks ago.

I mean, when some of you turned, I went to turn on the water in my master bath and something was plugging it ice, and then later it came flooding out.

It was broken.

Ooh, that's no good.

All right, so let's.

And then we have the revelatory gifts.

Those are the gifts of the Word of wisdom, the gifts of the Word of knowledge and the gift of discerning of spirits.

Not the gift of discernment, but the gift of discerning of spirits, in other words, seeing into the spirit realm.

And so the revelatory gifts and then, of course, the power gifts, which I believe in the Brother Hagin and others have prophesied that the power gifts are gonna be in such manifestation In the final part of the last days.

It's going to exceed the book of Acts.

I wanna remind you, in the book of Acts people were raised from the dead.

I mean, blind, eyes were open, lame, walked.

In the book of Acts I'll tell you something else happened.

A king died when an angel smote him.

That was a manifestation of the spirit, that was a power gift in manifestation.

How about the time when Paul said you, enemy of the gospel, you, child of the devil, you always resist the holy ghost?

He said well, you're not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord.

Now, behold, thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season.

Notice, he didn't pet him on the head and say, oh well, we'll have a debate next week.

No, he rebuked him because he was trying to stop the gospel from coming out and the prophet spoke judgment over him.

That was a word of knowledge, that was a gift of working of miracles and it was against something.

Well, we haven't even seen what God wants to do.

But it's not all gonna be sweetness and light.

I mean, how many of you know Jesus didn't go over there laughing when he overturned the table with money changers and whipped them out of there?

I mean, he drove them out with a whip.

He was not kind, he was not sweet.

I see people just think that we've got to just be like marshmallows.

I believe now is the time for us to have some of that holy, righteous anger at what we are seeing in our society and speak against it, cry against it and confront it.

So spiritual manifestations and it all goes back to all of us responding and yielding to the Holy Ghost.

I've got to.

The worship team needs to, but all of us do, all of our leaders do, everyone that's associated with the glorious way church, when we begin to respond, will help usher in the greatest demonstration of the spirit that the church has ever seen.

Just write this is what's needed for that final harvest Demonstration of the spirit.

Come on, lift your hands and receive the word of God tonight.

Praise God.

How many of you believe that the more I preach along these lines, the more we're going to have it?

Amen.