And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:18-20

The question that comes around today in churches a lot is, How much authority does the believer have?  As much as Jesus can trust you with.

All authority comes from God.  God created government, stewardship, and the one authority structure that pertains to us everyone on the Earth today, the family.  God delegates His authority, that is, He gives individuals the responsibility to manage certain things, and so much as they faithfully execute their duties, they are permitted to continue.

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An entire oak tree is contained well within a tight, easy to carry package.  It has it’s own leathery cover, and even a handy carrying cup attached to the top.  You could, in fact, carry a hundred complete oak trees just in your pants pockets alone (assuming you’ve got big pockets).  The only thing you need to add, in order to convert your easy to transport oak tree into an immovable pillar is some sunshine, a plot of dirt, some water, and a hundred years or so!

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, that when planted, it is the smallest of seeds, but when it grows, it becomes the largest of all garden plants, and the birds of the air make their nest in it.

Matthew 13:31-32

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If you would see the Kingdom, you must be born again.  If you would enter into His life, His Word of life must come into you as a seed and begin to grow.

Everything starts small.  It starts obscure.  We do not despise the smallness, but we understand that everything which is planted, in its full time, grows to maturity.

From the yeast beginning with just a small bit for the entire dough, to the mustard seed which would grow, the life of the Spirit must begin very small, yet grow to its size.

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The Kingdom of Heaven is the eternal reign and realm of God.  It is not God, yet is inseparable from Him and His attributes.  It is the perfect picture of government, as we understand such, in that it is perfectly just and righteous, perfectly merciful, humble, and powerful.  Indeed all true human government derives itself from it.

We must not confuse the Kingdom with the church.  The church is related to the Kingdom, and the Kingdom is related to the church, but we must not look at the outward expression of what we know as “church” and equate it with the Kingdom.

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The more I read and understand the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:3-12, the happier I get. Hugely Happy. Ultra Happy. Maximumly Happy. Macro happy even, which is what the word translated “blessed” actually means, if you look it up. It doesn’t mean “blessed”. That would be eulegio. This is Macagredso… horribly transliterated, but… macro + agredso… macro meaning big, agredso meaning… well… HAPPY!
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What ever happened to the Kingdom?  Jesus said,

But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Luke 11:20

We have lost sight of the Kingdom.  Jesus came to set the captives free.  We can prophesy, we can cast out demons in His name, we can do might works and miracles, but we have lost the Kingdom.

I am not waiting for another dispensation for some grandiose allotment of power and authority from heaven.  Jesus declared sufficiently, after His passion and resurrection, that ALL authority in Heaven and Earth was His (Matthew 28:18).  We are not waiting for God to flip a switch in heaven; He already did that.  All we are waiting for is for the switch to be thrown in us.

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Now, Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

Substance is “hypo-stasis” in the Greek.  Hypo meaning “beneath”, and stasis meaning “the state, status, or structure of a thing”.  That is, the underlying, inherent nature of an object, its foundation, its unseen, non-physical yet spiritual essence.  Whether it is an apple, a thought, or a person, to have faith in or for something is to have it for real, whether or not you see it manifested in the natural.  For example, if you say, “I believe such and such will happen”, that is hope.  If you have the substance of the thing hoped for, the very reality of that thing, though yet unseen, that is what Faith is.

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“‘At the end of 1965, He who now stands in the forefront of the healing ministry as a prophet will be taken out of the way. He’ll make a false step and Satan shall destroy his life, but his spirit will be saved, and his works will follow him. Ere 1966 shall come, he shall be gone.’  –Kenneth Hagin

The prophecy stated that the leader of the deliverance movement was soon to be taken in death, because he was getting into error and the Lord was having to remove him from the scene for that reason. Gordon took the prophecy and placed it in his desk. After Brother Hagin left I asked, ‘What do you think about this? Is this Branham?’  Gordon answered gravely, ‘Yes, it is Branham. He is getting into error. He thinks he is Elijah. He thinks he is the messenger of the covenant. The sad thing is that unscrupulous men around him are putting words into his mouth, and due to his limited background he is taking them up.'”

William Branham was a man sent from God.  No one else in the modern century has come close to his accuracy, humility, and giftedness.  He also got off.  Way off, if you talk to some.  If you read some his published works, not to mention his nearly 2,000 recorded sermons and broadcasts, you will come across it.  He was a man, and just as we do not rush out to stone every woman caught in adultery, we do not, in New Testament Christianity, rush out to stone every man when his doctrine gets off.  Surely, every one of us had our doctrine a little “off” before we got saved, and it took at least a little while to get it straightened out after that.  He was a man with less than an eighth grade education!

Whether Branham as a prophet was false stands on something else, although his end does matters as well.  But, if we judge by the same standard for us, I would err on the side of mercy and grace, believing for the same for myself one day.

One of Branham’s major works, published at the end of his life, was his Exposition of the Seven Church Ages.  In it, he presented his teaching that the seven churches of the first three chapters of the book of Revelation were to be interpreted as church ages, or periods of time, each one to follow the other in sequence, through the two thousand years of church history we have had.  Following this, would come the fulfillment of the ages, the tribulation and sequence of events following in Revelation 4-22.

From the end of the book, the very last paragraph in fact, I quote the following:

Not for one moment do I bring a message to the people that they may follow me, or join my church, or start some fellowship and organization. I have never done that and will not do that now. I have no interest in those things, but I do have an interest in the things of God and people, and if I can accomplish just one thing I will be satisfied. That one thing is to see established a true spiritual relationship between God and men, wherein men become new creations in Christ, filled with His Spirit and live according to His Word. I would invite, plead and warn all to hear His voice at this time, and yield your lives completely to Him, even as I trust in my heart that I have given my all to Him. God bless you, and may His coming rejoice your heart.

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The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

Matthew 6:22-23

The eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is clear, your whole body also is full of light; but when it is bad, your body also is full of darkness. Then watch out that the light in you is not darkness. If therefore your whole body is full of light, with no dark part in it, it will be wholly illumined, as when the lamp illumines you with its rays.

Luke 11:34-36

The teaching of the Kingdom is a simple thing.  It is, actually, the smallest of all seeds, even though it produces the biggest plant.

You could put a whole lot of effort into studying the teachings of Jesus, and cataloging them, and indeed, many have, and many of these works have been profitable.  However, whether they are understood and lived is an entirely different matter.

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He spoke another parable to them, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.”

Matthew 13:33

“It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.”

Luke 13:21

Yeast is an invisible, yet active agent, acting and working throughout an otherwise inert lump of dough.  In various places in the Old Testament, it depicted the nature of evil within a body, either a single person or a group of people.  Hence, the phrase, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” was used to indicate much the same thing that a phrase like “one bad apple spoils the bunch” does.

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