Adjusting Your Receiver 1

Your bibles up, please, wave them around, rest your body a little bit, twist around a little, what?

Try to get like you did last summer.

And let's say this together say heavenly father, I'm glad to be here tonight.

I have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to me.

I'm listening for my benefit.

Tonight I'm feeding my faith, I'm developing my own spirit with the word of God.

I'm giving you the word of God in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Mark 11, please.

Verse 24 is our first verse.

Mark 11, 24, you thought I was going to say Mark 11, 23, didn't you?

It's closed.

Jesus says therefore I say unto you you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them and you shall have them.

So, when you pray, believe you receive them and you shall have them.

And then a song of Solomon, chapter two, verse 15,.

You don't have to turn there, I'll just quote it.

A part of the verse says the little foxes spoil the vine.

Little foxes spoil the vine.

So tonight I wanted to share a message entitled adjusting your receiver, adjusting your receiver.

What things, whoever you desire, when you pray, believe you receive.

Everybody shout receive.

So you have to have your receiver in good order receiver, your receiver.

And the Greek word lambano is the word receive and it means to take, and it means literally to take up away.

Take up away, in other words pick up.

You think about something on the ground, you take up away.

You receive, you take it, you take it, you pick it up.

And so what things?

Whoever you desire, when you pray, pick it up, pick it up.

Believe you pick it up and you shall have it.

Believe you pick it up, not you're gonna pick it up.

You picked it up when you went, when you prayed, and then you shall have it.

Many times we have to make adjustments.

We have to make adjustments in our receiving from God.

To get results.

We'll pray and time goes by, and of course time always goes by.

There's seed time in harvest.

That's where we, that's how we receive from God.

You don't plant something today and get a harvest tomorrow.

There's a seed time, there's a time of germination until, and then the seed germinates and puts a little sprout up through there, and then first the blade, then the ear and then, after that, the full corn in the ear.

It takes time.

You don't get instant results, but sometimes you know when you're believing for something and you've prayed and you believe that it's God's will for you to have that thing and you believe you receive it and you start thanking God for it.

It doesn't show up.

Sometimes it's time to check your receiver.

Little foxes can spoil the vine.

Little things maybe adjust.

I like to call it adjustments.

Sometimes we need to make adjustments Healing, provision, deliverance.

It doesn't just fall on us out of heaven just because we're believers, just because we're spirit filled Christians, just because we belong to glorious way, church, I mean all of that stuff.

No, they don't.

Just it doesn't fall on there.

Just we have to receive, we must receive, and so if there's a problem, if there is a problem, the problem's not on God's side.

It never on God's side.

God's never the problem.

It's so vain and so worthless and such a waste of time to blame God for anyway.

Just learn to look in the mirror, learn to ask God okay, this thing that I've been believing for, do I need to make an adjustment?

I don't want anything to be held up, and if I need to make an adjustment, show me.

I grew up as a kid.

I was born in the late 40s and grew up in the 50s, and so I still remember when my dad we lived in Galena Park in those years, near the ship channel, because my dad worked in the shipyards in World War II.

So he bought a house in Galena Park which is its own little city, a joining Houston, but it has its own mayor, city council, just a little city there.

And so I still remember when we left we had the radio but we quit watching.

I quit listening to the radio because we got a TV and it was kind of had rabbit ears and I'll never forget you're black and white and you know you move the rabbit ears and you know if you get a pretty good channel two came in better than 11 and 13.

You know Houston was a rare, they had three stations here.

But I mean it was man, it was great.

I mean I in fact I laid on the floor and looked up at the TV with my hands under my head like this and John, get back from the TV, you're too close, you're gonna mess up your eyes.

And they kept saying that over me off for ever until I had to have glasses.

They blamed it on being too close to the television.

I don't think that anything to do with it, but anyway, when we moved to refurio and going into my fourth grade year, refurio was different than Houston, than Glen Park.

Refurio was at least 50 miles from from the transmitter and and so we turned the TV on there and refurio it was snowy.

I mean, you know, it was like watching TV in a blizzard.

You know, you kind of make it, make it out.

It was very, it was boring.

So I was so disappointed because TV was my life.

I mean, you know, you know you're 11 years old.

You'd say TV is men.

I got to have TV.

I can't stand this.

So my dad went out, bought this big old mask, it got this big old antenna, huge thing and he had this, this motor up on the top.

It took all day to put that thing and he wouldn't let somebody do, he did it himself wired, it had this thing on the on the top.

I don't know if anybody had one of those, but it had a dial on the top of the TV.

You turn that dial and outside it went click and it would turn the antenna and you could fine-tune the antenna and get a better picture on channel.

You know, back then it was channel six and channel three and I think that's all they had in corpus.

But it worked out pretty good.

But the tuner you had to, you had to, you had to tune in, you had to make adjustments to get a picture.

I you know little foxes spoiled the vine.

Sometimes it's just you got to turn, turn the rabbit ears, turn the tuner just a little bit to get the right picture.

One time, gladys night, my family, we'd moved corpus during the mid 80s because in my business, the home building business, we had a depression.

It wasn't a recession, it was a depression, and all the builders that I knew went broke.

I mean every one of them, all the, all the mom and pop businesses and the big companies took over.

And so you know, you, just, you have hardly any small building companies anymore except the real high-end, the guys that build up multi-million dollar houses and river oaks, tear downs and stuff like that.

Some of those are closely held individuals, but most, everybody else are big, large, publicly traded.

You know companies that that build all the houses.

They took us out.

That was one of the big things that happened in the mid 80s with the financial reforms that they.

They called them reforms.

They just in favor of big business and to the demise of small businesses is what it was for me, and so, anyway, we moved to corpus and we we, we were renting a house there.

I had gotten a job and the depression hadn't hit corpus yet it was soon to come, and so there was a subdivision next to order, where we lived, called North Shore, and it was a nice.

It had a golf course, it was.

It was developed and finished right about the wrong time.

I mean, you know, you know a whole state was was hurting and they had some builders that came in from Dallas and built a bunch of houses it didn't sell, and so there was at least a dozen houses that were new, brand new, that had never been lived in, that were basically the bank had taken back, and so we would go out.

We had friends and that lived in that neighborhood, so we'd all go walking in the evening, go walking by those houses and look in the windows, and I took the number down of a house around the corner from us and I called the bank that owned it in corpus and come to find out.

I knew the guy that was the president of that savings and loan at the time and I hid long, lonely money when he used to work in corpus.

So we both moved to corpus to get away from the, from the depression.

He was a lender and I'm potentially a borrower, but I wasn't building then.

I was developing.

So I said hey, I saw you got this house, gave me the address, yeah, he said I.

Said, what are you asking?

He gave me this present.

Whoo man, that's, that's kind of high, he said I.

He said, well, are you interested in it?

I said, well, yeah, I'm kind of interested in it, but I can't get in and I don't want to mess with a realtor because I'm not that serious.

I'd like to look at it.

And he gave me the combination of the lockbox and so on a Friday night we went in, opened the house and we all went in and looked at it and we went out.

It was an unusual kind of house because it was one story and it had a side yard with a pool in the side yard.

It was a corner and so the house wrapped around the pool on three sides and had and they hadn't mowed the grass around the pool.

The grass was this tall and and so we walked outside and it by that time is getting close to dark and for some reason I didn't put the key in my pocket.

I had the key in my hand and I dropped the key in that deep grass by the swimming pool and, oh my god, I thought, what am I gonna do?

We've got there's no way to lock the house.

It's got a.

It's got a double key deadbolt on the front door that I opened and that's.

We have to go out that door and we can't lock the house.

We're gonna leave the house open all weekend if I can't find this key.

And then I've got to call this guy that I know and he's not gonna like it very much, you know he's got an inconvenience.

So I, you know, I kind of got shook there for a minute and I call myself down and I pray.

Okay, god help me, I need, I need to find this key.

I knew about where it was.

See, sometimes we know about where we need to check our receiver.

Sometimes there's things, adjustments.

You could, you know, if you'd sit and think and meditate a while, ask the Lord to help you find out where what adjustments you need to make.

You can look in certain places and get your adjustment, and so, thank God, I didn't have to look in the entire yard.

I never would have found it, but I knew about where I dropped it, and so we got on our hands and knees.

I said now don't step over here in this area, just be careful, just reach down.

And at about 10 minutes later I pulled that key up and I was so relieved, I mean, I was so glad I found the pearl of great price.

I found the gold corn in the fish's mouth and we did not buy that house, thank God.

But you know, sometimes we just need to pray and find out what adjustment it is that we need to make in order for things to free up in our lives.

I mean, you know, sometimes we come against certain things that just don't seem to change, and so let's find out what it is, but what can we do to change the situation?

And this time of the year, in 1994, so it's been 26 years ago this today I was in Paris with brother Osteen.

He'd asked me to go there and do a pastor's conference there for a friend of his that was pastoring in Paris.

He's an Indian fellow and he had a church full of immigrants.

They were mostly from East Africa.

They're in Paris working, so they had immigrants there and most of his church were immigrants.

So he said just come along with me, travel with me.

And so we did.

But my business was really declining in those years.

I'd gotten back in the home building business and it just things just weren't clicking very well and so we were getting over jet lag.

One day We'd just gotten there and I got on his schedule Whatever schedule he's on, that's the schedule I'm on.

So we would be awake in the three o'clock in the morning, we'd wake up at three and have a cup of coffee.

We try to wait till the sun come up.

So that day we waited till the sun came up and we went down and we got on a boat and we sailed on the river the same river, saying, you know, went through all those old, ancient bridges that they have over the same and everything, beautiful city.

And while we were waiting to get on the boat, I said you know, brother Osteen, I'm just sick and tired of life, didn't use good faith talk, but I said I'm sick and tired of lack.

And I know there's no problem with God, god's word is true.

I must have missed him somehow.

When I get back to Houston I'm gonna have to take some time and find out where I missed it.

See, I was searching.

I was searching for where was the lost key?

Why was my business stuck?

Why was my finances so hard to break through?

I mean, I was anyway go through a lot of different things and so we got back.

This was in July.

So when we got back it was really like I think it's the actual date, august the second, when I was praying early one morning I got back.

I had to wake up at like five o'clock to get and drive across town.

I was working.

My business was hired by another builder and I was doing finish ups for him and helping him, because all my house I had one house to for sale and nobody was buying.

It was a $650,000 house sitting there and paying interest on it.

Finally, I couldn't pay any more interest.

I had to tell the bank I had to be at their mercy.

Are you gonna take the house?

No, we'll leave it alone for a few months.

And they did.

They didn't charge me any interest.

Well, they charged it, but they didn't collect it.

$4,000 a month interest on the construction loan how would you like that little nut to crack?

And so and I couldn't pay myself anything out of the company.

I had no money.

So I was working for him, for my, for part of my wages, my other builder.

So I got up early one morning and suddenly I got this word from God.

He said son, you're a minister of the sanctuary.

Holy ghost spoke to me Son, you're a minister of the sanctuary.

And I knew about where it was.

And I looked up my Bible, hebrews 8, to Jesus, who is the minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord pitched to, not man.

So I had half of a verse that God told me who I was Say.

That was a key to what my lost key was.

My adjustment was that I needed to be in the full-time pastoral ministry.

That no longer was God accepting my service at Lakewood as an associate pastor.

And then, you know, I was doing all the work of an associate pastor weddings, funerals, traveling with him, you know, so forth, and then have my own business.

God was done with it.

He wanted me full-time.

And so I woke up, gladdice.

I said, honey, god spoke to me this morning, you know, and I wasn't sure what she would say, because over the years, I mean, I'd made you know early on I knew I was called a pastor and the first time I talked to Gladdice about it.

She didn't want to hear it.

And so I went to the Lord and said Lord, she's not even listening, she doesn't even want to hear anything I have to say about it.

She said well, he said, do you blame her?

She married an engineer and you didn't even have, you didn't even have the guts to become an engineer.

You made a decision to be a home builder and didn't even tell her until you'd made the decision.

You blame her, said you, leave her to me, I'll take care of her.

You leave her alone.

About the ministry, I said okay, sir, I get what you're saying.

You know, when I was going through A&M, you know I was working every other semester.

But after we got married she's working and she was supporting us, basically my little money that I made.

All it did was pay the tuition and pay a little bit.

But she was working and supporting us.

And so when I graduated, she got her diploma.

She had a PhT pushing hubby through from the Mechanical Engineering Wives Club.

They gave her a diploma.

She said we still got it on.

It's not hanging on the wall either, but anyway, you ought to hang it on the wall next to mine.

So I said honey.

I said it's time.

We've been in the unholy business long enough.

We need to get in the holy.

You know, sanctuary means holy things.

We need to be about the holy things and I believe that's the key for us to get a breakthrough.

And after that, of course, the history of it was meeting with Brother Osteen and him giving me some direction as to how to do what I was proposing to do.

I didn't tell him, hey, god told me.

I submitted my desire to him and gave him full veto power, and that was how this church started.

So adjust your receiver.

God has already given what you're looking for and you've got to receive.

So adjust your receiver.

So I've got three things here.

Are you ready?

All right?

The first one I find in the next verse, mark 11, 25.

So adjust your receiver.

Number one make sure you walk in love.

See the very next verse when you stand praying forgive if you have ought against any, that your Father also, which is of heaven, may forgive you your trespasses.

So make sure you're walking in love.

I mean, if I was experiencing anything that was blockading my faith, blockading my results, I would check my love walk.

Am I walking in love?

Am I being, you know, hard to deal with, hard to get along with, so forth and so on.

No one.

Forgiveness Again.

I was talking about Doty this morning.

But Doty I mean when she received the news of cancer metastatic cancer, the liver, one of the things that she did among many things that she did to get her healing.

She wrote a book, all about it, but she wrote letters to anyone and everyone she could even dream of that she may have offended.

I mean, she went through her life.

You talk about searching the grass, you think about parting the grass and looking for something missing.

That's what she did.

And she came up with people.

She'd write a letter and invariably people would write her oh Doty, no way, oh no, I'm not offended.

So this one lady that she wrote when she was a little girl, you know, she had polio, so she loved to go out and play baseball but she couldn't run the bases and so whenever she played she'd get up and swing the bat and this little girl, the other little girl, wanted to run for her.

She ran the bases for Doty and so she wrote her.

She said you know, dear, whatever her name was, dear Carolyn, you know, you spent all that time running the bases for me.

You must have resented that.

I'm so sorry I made you do that.

I should have just sat.

I should have just sat in the bleachers.

There was no reason for me to be out there swinging the bat and you having it.

You could have played baseball yourself instead of you running around the base.

Oh, doty, it was my honor.

I was so honored to be able to do that for you.

See, she couldn't find anything, but she, she went through the exercise.

What I'm trying to say she's looking for her receiver.

She was adjusting that receiver.

Are you with me now?

Make sure you're walking in love.

That's number one.

And uh, and then the, the second one.

This is one of first John chapter five.

Let's look at that one, one of my favorite verses.

First John chapter five, verse 14.

And this is the confidence that we have in him, or concerning him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us.

And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.

So the second point is make sure that what you desire and what you're asking for is God's will for you to have you.

You can't have any faith unless you know what the will of God is.

The faith, your faith, but again, is where the will of God is known.

Obviously you don't have to ask God if it's his will to heal you.

Healing is is God's will, deliverance is God's will, protection is God's will.

You don't have to.

Oh God, would you please protect me on my trip?

No, you just claim it.

You don't have to ask for it, it's yours.

But then you know, a few years ago all the preacher friends that I knew were buying Harley-Davidson's.

And then I love the sound of a Harley-Davidson's, I mean they sound so good.

I just, you know, and I kind of I didn't even ask God, I just kind of floated around and kind of just hung around Harleys and I went to the Harley shop a couple of times and sat on a couple of them and I got my kids one Christmas.

They bought me this coffee table book with these huge, big old, thick and it was full of custom made Harleys.

This guy, arlen Ness, he's a, you know, just amazing artist and builds all these custom Harleys.

And I dream about a Harley and I didn't even ask the Lord.

I mean I kind of knew that it wasn't, it wasn't for me.

I knew it.

And then and then one day he just spoke to me.

He says you're not going to have a Harley.

I said oh, thank you sir.

No, that's right, that was a waste of time.

For a year and a half I saved myself a bruised kidney.

I knew one guy bruised his kidney.

I knew another guy that scraped all the hide off of his.

He fell off his Harley going about 15 miles an hour and he left.

All his hide came off.

I mean he said the Lord saved me a lot of trouble.

But make sure that whatever it is that you're desiring, not everything's in the Bible, not everything is obvious when we're desiring things.

So I heard Kenneth Copeland say this almost 40 years ago.

He said the trouble with most Christians you pray too fast, you don't spend enough time investigating whether it's God's will for you to have this thing that you're, if you just got to have, and you're begging God, you're asking God you believe and receive it.

I believe, well, you can't say that if you don't know it in your spirit.

I mean God has to be the one to give it to you.

You can't claim by faith anything that God didn't give you in the story.

So it takes time, you know we have to spend time finding out what belongs to us and, of course, john 16, 14, the Holy Spirit will show you what belongs to you.

I mean, let's get on speaking terms with the Holy Ghost.

He'll show you what belongs to you and then finally adjust your receiver.

Make sure you ask God to lead you to the area of your life that you need to adjust in order to receive.

You know a lot of this has to do with maturity.

In my case, you know, I was immature, wanting what other people had.

Talking about the Harley.

Nothing wrong with you having a Harley.

If you've got a Harley, I'm not trying to talk you out of it, I'm just saying for me, god didn't want me to have it.

I don't know, I'm not gonna even ask.

I knew my wife didn't want me to have it.

But you know what?

He let me have a Corvette.

Glory to God.

Somebody said oh, you're having a midlife crisis.

I said I don't have no crisis.

I got a Corvette.

He's gone.

He ain't got no crisis.

Now that I've had one, I don't need another one.

Praise the Lord.

That's over.

But Ephesians 4, 15 says that we ought to grow up in him and all things Grow up in him.

You know, maturity will help you to know what belongs to you.

First, corinthians 13, 11.

Let's look at that one real quick.

Talking about maturing, that's the job of the pastor.

The five-fold ministry is to mature you.

Verse 11, first Corinthians 13, 11.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.

So much of what we're asking God for and begging Him for and believing Him for is just, you know, to put it mildly, it's just mostly, it's just childish.

So as we grow, we mature in the things that we're looking for and we're asking for the things that satisfy us.

Amen.

And so in my case, you know, many times I've had the thing that I'm missing is joy.

I mean I haven't been laughing enough, I hadn't been praising enough, I hadn't been joyful enough.

Thank God for joy.

The joy of the Lord is your strength.

If you let the pressures of this life get so heavy and disappointments way down on you and all of that kind of thing, until you don't have any joy left, I mean you're in danger.

You're in danger and also, when you're like that, you're easily offended and when you get offended you can get out of the will of God, just like that, easily offended.

Say that means what it means.

You need to grow, you need to mature.

Come on, you're not a baby.

You know you don't get anything by throwing a tantrum.

Come on, let's grow up in Him, amen.

And so as you adjust your receiver, you'll strengthen your prayer connection with God and healing will come, finances will come, breakthrough will occur.

I got another example that 2016 was a challenging year for the church.

I mean, I'm telling you we made it, but it was rough financially and we've always paid every bill.

We've never been laid on any bills.

But when you have a loan in today's day I had a friend of mine I won't say where it was, but he had a similar situation that we had.

We had a very low loan to value ratio.

In other words, the value of our property was so high and our loan was low in relation.

So our loan to value on a normal house when you go like, say, when you're gonna go buy a house, you need to have 80% loan to value.

If you try to borrow 90%, you're gonna pay a bigger rate.

You're gonna have to have insurance, credit credit, mortgage insurance, and that puts another quarter of a point on your rate and so.

But we had a 33% loan to value on this building.

I mean our property was worth so much money compared to what we had borrowed.

Well, actually that worked against us because of the deed of trust.

The deed of trust basically gave the mortgage company the power to call the note almost for any reason at all.

If they woke up one morning and just didn't like you, they could just call the note.

And in the Obama years the lenders were under a lot of pressure and my lender had gotten made some bad loans.

They made some loans that didn't work out for them and so they hired outside underwriters to come in that didn't work for their company.

They weren't Christians, they're just regular outside.

I mean I borrowed from Christians, I borrowed from Assembly of God Retirement Fund.

All the interest we paid on that loan went to help a little retired Assembly of God pastors and their retirement.

So it stayed in the family.

We didn't give it.

We didn't increase Wall Street, amen.

We didn't help out Chase Bank, we're helping out preachers.

It's all in the family.

So I felt good about it.

But then they brought in these guys outside and they started asking us to do all kind of stuff.

I mean, they added some things that they wanted us to do every year that cost us several thousand dollars, that we never had to do before, we had to have.

Yet we already have a CPA looking over our stuff.

And then we had to have a certified, audited financial, which costs several thousand dollars every year.

Every time you turn around at something else, picky about the insurance, picky about this, picky about that and I had a friend who had a similar situation and he was having a hard time and they offered okay, well, we'll let you not make any payments.

Well, I got the same offer.

After Ike, I had an offer from my loan officer at the lender.

He said Pastor, would you like to take off some months?

We can give you six months off of your payments.

If you don't want to make any payments for the next six months, it won't bother us.

I said, oh no, I'm gonna keep making payments.

I didn't have a witness at all.

In fact I was.

I didn't like it.

I felt like I was being set up, and you know what I was, because that brother took them up on the offer and they foreclosed on him and took his church and he had a beautiful campus, a beautiful.

He was working on the buildings and stuff, and now he's meeting in the school.

He had to go all the way back to the beginning, and so I knew that.

And so in 2016, I mean, I'm looking at our, we're making the payments, but it's tough, it's tough, and so I started searching for the missing key Early 2017, I went, in fact, late 2016, and God began to show me some different things.

He wanted to shift where we were spending money.

He wanted us to shift where we were sowing seed, and we moved money out of one ministry that we had supported for many years and we were a major portion of their ministry, and it really hurt to do that, but I had to obey God.

I'm gonna tell you right now within weeks, everything started turning around as soon as I made an adjustment, as where we were sowing seed, we just went in a different direction and I mean we haven't looked back since then.

We sold the property, then we paid off the loan.

Amen, praise God.

See, it's good.

It's good to adjust.

Your receiver, come on, lift your hands in.

Receive tonight, hallelujah, let's make the adjustments, let's get the snow out of our picture.

Oh, there's no fun watching snow.

I still remember the first time my dad, 1963, he sprung for a color television.

All of my buddies that played football, I was the only one, number one.

I was the only one that lived in a house with a slab and everybody else had these old timey houses up on blocks in Referio and we had terrazzo floors.

Does anybody know what terrazzo is?

Well, our floors were terrazzo, and so in the hot summertime in August is when two a day started.

And so after the morning workout, we get up at six it's just barely daylight.

You go out there and you get your hands down in those grass burrs and you start hitting each other in the face and you start sweating and bleeding and everything.

And then finally 10 o'clock comes after four hours and, man, you drink all the water and all the tea you can drink and they would come and lay on our floor all in our living room on that cold slab.

It was ice cold because the air conditioner, my dad, liked it cold.

He turned the air down to 69 degrees and that cold man, it would just all the heat would leak out of you and go into that terrazzo floor and we turn on the color TV and watch Hazel.

Anyway, let's all stand together, mr B, mr B, anyway, treat yourself to an episode of Hazel.

There's no cursing, there's no bad stuff in it at all.