Bethel Deliverance International Church

Guest (Male): Yes, there does seem to be a search for your heart. There does. In Ecclesiastes, he says, "I call for my lovers, they deceive me." There seems to be scattered, salted throughout the Bible this hunt for people to love me. It's almost like God is saying, "I don't feel complete unless you all love me."

It's the weirdest thing. We go around in Pentecost and we teach the self-sufficiency of God, and he keeps looking for folks to love him. It's almost as if his heart is broken if you don't love him. Now, if he was the God that we proposed, he would say, "Fine, then don't love me, step off." But he keeps reaching out for us even when you walk away. "Get back here." It's like he's saying, "I know you want to leave me, but I refuse to let you go."

Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr.: Well, praise the Lord everyone and welcome to the Climbing Higher broadcast. You know, here at Bethel, our title is really our heart. We want to climb higher in the things of God. We want to get so close to God that, if you'll forgive my terminology, he gets irritated with every time he turns around. Here's somebody from Bethel in my presence, praising me and worshiping me.

Here they come again, and you know what? They don't want anything. They just want to sit in my presence and praise me for who I am. That's the mentality we have here at Bethel. I believe with all of my heart that God has a divine purpose for all of his children. I don't necessarily think that that purpose is ministry-related in every sense of the word.

Sometimes you just may have the purpose of helping someone who's down-trodden, of breathing life into someone's desperate situation. Whatever that purpose is, you ought to seek to fulfill it. Now, with discovering your purpose and understanding your purpose and staying with your purpose, we're going to present this message to you today using the letter to the Colossian Christians.

If you understand anything about the letter to the Colossians, Paul tries to get them away from being held captive by the culture that they were in and learning how to fulfill the purpose of every believer, which is to seek the things of God. That's right, he says, since you are risen with Christ in chapter 3, seek those things which are above where Christ sits on the right hand of God.

So today you hear a whole lot of discovering your purpose, and usually it's connected to ministry and ministerial titles. But Paul tells the Colossian Christian that your purpose is to seek Jesus and then to carry out the great commandment of sharing that knowledge about Jesus to everyone you encounter. Listen to the message today and I'll be back at the close of the broadcast to encourage you just a little bit more. God bless you.

Guest (Male): Most of us know how to be successful for ourselves, but not for people who come after us. If you think of the dynamic here, we were always mentally, emotionally, psychologically enslaved. We were taught that we were insignificant beings. It's okay to be taught that, but it's horrible when you believe it.

The children of Israel were taught that they were insignificant beings while they were in Egypt. This is identified as they come out of Egypt. The first time they hit trouble, they say to Moses, "Take us back to Egypt, because Master will take care of us. Take us back to Egypt." We want to go back. They were so deceived they said, "Where we had fish, garlic, melons, freely." No, you didn't.

It's the same principle. The things that were written aforetime were written for our learning. You were born in sin, and you got used to sin, and you learned how to function in sin. You did not understand permanent blessing. You understood situational blessing. This is identified in how you pray: "Lord, give me that job," not "Lord, give me a business."

Because a business then would force you to bless somebody else. The job takes care of you. So you would come to God and insist on his help to bless you, but you did not know how to bring anyone else into your blessing. Even in our Pentecostal movement, we said things like, "I'm going to get mine. I don't care if you don't praise him, I'm going to get mine," failing to realize that it's called corporate worship.

Now, if you look here in Deuteronomy 6, why is it so important for God to have his children identified by a lifestyle, not by blessings? Let's look. "Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments which the Lord your God commanded to teach you that you might do them in the land where you are going to possess it." The Bible is a book of protocols, principles, and procedures for life specifically designed for humanity, but mostly adhered to by God's children.

It is very difficult for us to understand why God insists on this separation. By the time you migrate over into Pentecostalism and you come from Methodism, you come from Presbyterianism, you come from even the Baptist church, you come from organized religion into Pentecostal expression, all the discipline goes away once you become Pentecostal. You are now led by the Lord without order, without purpose.

Individual, whimsical behavior is identified with the phrase, "The Lord told me, what I got in my spirit, this is what God is saying to me," but there is not one shred of biblical connection to what you've got in your spirit. And since God cannot go against his word because God is not double-minded and he's not two-faced, if he said it, it's for eternity.

But proper rules of exegesis and hermeneutics says that I must read what's said and extract from it a meaning, even though the initial thought, the initial teaching, does not apply to my culture, my time. But the meaning somehow does. There's a point that the author is trying to get over to us. My task in proper exegesis is to discover the meaning.

You must be honest enough to believe that every time you pick up this book, you approach it with presuppositions. You have an idea in your mind as to what you think it means. When you cannot prove it by a preponderance of the evidence from the word of God, you are now guilty of creating dogma. Paul told Timothy that the scripture, the word of God, is profitable for doctrine. He did not say dogma.

Dogma is what you create. There is exegesis, which means something you pull out of what's there, and then there's something we call eisegesis, and that's what you put in to justify you. But today we want to focus on something to help you understand the existential why. Existentialism is a philosophy that was born around 1945, 1946 after the Second World War.

People witnessed over 21 million people were killed during that war over the whole life of the six-year war, and they lost hope. They became extremely depressed, they became frustrated, and from that frustration, psychologists developed an existential form of psychological help designed to move you past a form of PTSD and help you begin to realize the realities of life.

Existentialism calls you to throw up your hands in despair and say, "You know what? What's the use? Everything's coming to disrepair, nothing is substantial, nobody's going to love me, nobody cares anything about me, I'm never getting out of this situation, I don't know how I'm going to make it through." And so you begin to ask what we call the existential question: why? Why try? Why am I going through this? Why doesn't God do anything for me?

Against the backdrop of that mindset, God has placed hope in us. And that hope is worked out by our isolated living. Now you've got to stick with me because it's going to look like I'm being controversial, but I'm not, and I'm not trying to give you a paradox. Because you are called to separation, but it's united separation. It's almost one cancels out the other.

There are people that are like me; there's only a few of us in the world, and I mean real introverts. I'm not talking about those of you who say you are just to get somebody to talk to you. But there's a few of us real introverts, and I want you to understand what I'm saying and take it with a full explanation of what I'm saying. Don't judge me, just go along with me. I'm struggling because I'm trying to find a way to deliver this to you so you don't send it back to the kitchen and have them give you something else.

Real introverts like me, we don't like people. It's a struggle for us. And it's not that we are demonically supported to do this, it's that we don't trust you. And it's not that we don't trust you to not get along with you or not try to act out with you, it's that we don't want you close enough to hurt us. We're not introverts because we walk around with sticks looking to beat you over the head because you don't cheer for the Celtics.

No, no, no. We're introverts because we don't want to be hurt. True introversion is not just throwing people away, it's putting a wall around yourself and you're saying, "I ain't letting nobody in." Listen carefully, introverts have a problem trusting God. You very seldom find us laying on the floor of the altar because we don't trust the people who are coming over to minister to us.

And when we do get up, first thing we're going to do is check our pockets and our pocketbooks, and we're going to make sure we got up with what we fell down with. You seldom find true introverts falling out under the power. You can pray for them in the demonstration of the Holy Spirit, they're going to stand right there. "I ain't going down because I don't know who catching me."

My deacon may have to sneeze when I fall out, and now I've got a broken clavicle, a busted ear, and he's going on about, "Bless the Lord." Oh no. And so when you get to this point where God is demanding absolute trust, we don't know how to give it to him because we, true introverts, don't have a point of reference. The last person we trusted, the first person we trusted, let us get slapped when we were born. She was the first person we trusted, and she let somebody slap us. That's okay, I'm looking for the guy that slapped me. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

And so now these people are telling you, "Trust God, trust God, trust God," and nobody's ever telling you how. Now, you extroverts, you're just real faith builders. "Up, glory, I love you." You got saved yesterday and "I love Jesus" on Sunday. How? How do you love somebody in a day?

Listen to what he says: "These are the commandments, the statutes, the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded to teach you that you might do them in the land where you're going." Look at this. I'm telling you this for the future, so you can live these truths when you get over there. Now watch. He says, "That you might fear the Lord." He didn't say that you might love him.

Eventually you're going to love God. It took me 15 years to love him. Took me 15 years to love God. I'm not ashamed of it. He hung in there with me. Some of you, God bless you, I don't know how you do it. You got saved last week. "Praise, oh God, I just love him, I love him, I love him." Really? When was the last time you prayed? About six months ago, preacher. I haven't had time because I had to go see the new Michael Jackson movie two or three times because I just really want everybody to know Billie Jean's not my lover.

But the problem from a scriptural perspective, even though God himself says, "I want you to love me," it's almost like a Barry White song. "I want you to love me. Come on, turn out the lights and light a candle." Yes, there does seem to be a search for your heart. There does. In Ecclesiastes, he says, "I call for my lovers, they deceive me." There seems to be scattered, salted throughout the Bible this hunt for people to love me.

It's almost like God is saying, "I don't feel complete unless you all love me." It's the weirdest thing. We go around in Pentecost and we teach the self-sufficiency of God, and he keeps looking for folks to love him. It's almost as if his heart is broken if you don't love him. Now, if he was the God that we proposed, he would say, "Fine, then don't love me, step off."

But he keeps reaching out for us even when you walk away. "Get back here." It's like he's saying, "I know you want to leave me, but I refuse to let you go." Now, he don't have to beg and plead for your sympathy, but by the time he's finished shaking you—why? But he says here these commandments and statutes and judgments are given that you might fear the Lord.

Yes, that's right. I get an amen from the most innocent person in the congregation. He has no guilt, he don't even know what sin is, so he can go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." The rest of you are like, "Oh my God, let him that is without sin throw the first stone. Let me put my rocks in my pocket because Lord have mercy."

But now you begin to work through the text and you work through this first half of the book of Deuteronomy, and you find that what God is looking for to prove that you fear him—now in the Pentecostal church it was easy. You proved that you fear him when you came in the church; you weren't allowed to talk. Be quiet! Hold your peace, there'll be no talking, no joking.

Sit still. Today you watch people, they pick up bottles of water and drink it in church. When I came up, oh no, you drank water in church from a bottle, you died. You died, you choked on your water. And if you got chewing gum, you got a chewing demon. But now we just come into church like it's a movie theater. Pretty soon we're going to start selling popcorn in the rear of the church. Come on.

Why? It's not because we're demon-inspired, it's because we have no fear. In my youth, we would never say anything negative about the pastor. You swallowed it, you took it, you went to God, you said you were guilty, but you never say anything about the man or woman of God. Today, "He's just a person, just a man, just a woman, they ain't nobody."

You don't fear God. What happens when you lose your fear of God is your lifestyle begins to go south. You don't live properly anymore. You strip yourself of your heritage, and you begin living like someone who doesn't belong. You all know that I'm a Jamerican—of Jamaican DNA but American born. And there's one thing my dad did, bless his heart: he caused us to accept our Jamaican heritage and he put the rules and restrictions that he was brought up with in Jamaica on us.

We had boundaries that my friends didn't have because Daddy said, "You my children, and my children don't hang out on corners." I couldn't even hang out on corners until I was a late teenager because Daddy said, "We Jamaican, we don't do that. We have pride. We don't walk around with our britches all the way down to our behinds. We look decent."

People say, "Pastor Lambert, why you dress up in a shirt and tie every time you preach?" Because my father taught me to have self-respect. And when I do something of this magnitude, dress for who you represent. He would not let us mess around in school. I was the only one in my group—not my class, but my group, because you know within a class there's a group.

And in my group, I was the only one that brought books home every day, even if I didn't have homework. "You're going to bring your books home every day and you're going to study something. I don't care if you studied it before." Why? "Because you my children and you ain't going to be out in the street." My brother and I started working before anybody else in our groups because of my father teaching us.

And so the concept of God here in Deuteronomy that runs over into Leviticus is that you're God's children and there's a lifestyle that goes with that. There's a lifestyle that goes with being a child of God that you cannot escape. We're doing our darnedest to escape it. We're becoming culturally challenged, but yet we're giving into the culture.

It seems like it's more advantageous to strip yourself of connection with God to board a sinking ship. These principles are given to us so that we can learn to live by the principles of God. And there's a reward for living by the principles of God. He says if you do all the stuff in verse 2, he says, "And your sons' sons and all the days of your life and all the days of your sons' sons will be prolonged."

Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr.: Now, Paul tells us—he tells us that the enemy has been defeated, that Jesus has conquered him once and for all. And so you and I must now dedicate ourselves to seeking the things of the Lord. In fact, the commands that he gives us in chapter 3 of the letter to the Colossians in the first three verses have to do with setting your affections on things above where Christ sits on the right hand of God, to seek those things that come from the kingdom of God and then keep yourself in the love of God.

So we see that Paul tells us our purpose is Christ-centered, Christ-oriented, and dedicated to the furtherance of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Don't let the life of the Colossians at the beginning, where they were held captive by the culture—he even tells them, "Don't worry about holy days and holidays, but stay focused on your walk with God." That's your purpose. Your purpose is to connect with Christ.

That's why God sent Jesus. Jesus is the one who pulls us to God. Jesus is the one who died in our place, and you can never, ever overuse Christ. He is to be in all, through all, and for all. In fact, Paul says by him all things consist. And so I want to leave you with this thought: once you understand your purpose in God, strip yourself of everything else and begin to focus on how to get closer to Jesus.

When you get closer to Jesus, you know what's going to happen? You remember over in the book of Exodus where Moses gets to the point where he says to God, "Show me your glory"? And God said, "I can't do that because I'm so awesome that if I let you see me in my full glory, it would just suck all the light out of you because my glory is so powerful." But then he says, "There's a place by me and you can go stand on the rock."

And Paul tries to let us know that the rock is Jesus. And if you want to see God, take a good look at Jesus. Jesus said, "The Father and I are one." I love you with the love of God. I thank you for praying for us, I thank you for communicating with us as often as you do. We love you and we pray that you will continue to walk in the fulfillment of your purpose. God bless you.