Bethel Deliverance International Church

Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr.: I don't want God to maintain the status quo. I want God to do something new, unique, and different. God is so awesome that he can do something new every day, even though he says there's nothing new under the sun. God is the only one that can change that ruling and do something new for me today that he did not do yesterday and will not do tomorrow because I serve a big God, an awesome God, a great God, a giant God who has no equal!

We have enough gifts and titles, but we don't have any power. I would rather have power than a title. I don't care if you call me "Mister," as long as that sickness dies, as long as those eyes open up. When Paul reaches there, he tries to regulate their behavior. He really does. He says you have people going around prophesying; he said they should prophesy in order, in course, and then there should be someone to interpret when they are speaking in other languages.

He says you have people down there who are walking around gifted, but you don't know how to apply the gifts. Gifts were not designed to glorify the gifted; they were designed to glorify the gift giver. There are a few very important quotes that he gives to the church at Corinth. He tells them that you are incapable of receiving meat because you are carnal. You have become so possessed by the culture that you miss what God is doing.

He said, "I long to give you meat. I want to give you deep stuff." Deep stuff is not eschatology, it is not gifts, it is not any of that because he gives them that. But he says you were not strong enough, mature enough to get the weightier matters of relationship because you are still fighting amongst yourselves. He goes on to teach them about order. But there is an observation that he makes in Chapter 2. It is fitting that it is in the beginning of his letter.

Paul's letter to the Corinthians is really written in response to an abundance of problems. There was someone in the household of Chloe who was sending Paul messages saying, "You know these people down here, we have a guy down here who is incestuously involved with his stepmother, and none of the gifted people want to handle it." Paul said throw him out, disfellowship him, kick him out because the miracle power of God cannot work in an adversarial atmosphere.

As long as you are fighting each other, the Holy Spirit cannot flow. But we dealt with all of that, so you should not have odds with anyone. As a matter of fact, if you have odds with someone, if you have bad feelings with somebody, get up now and go apologize lest you hinder the flow of the anointing on me. Now, if you do not get up and apologize and make it right, and the Lord shows me that you are a problem, I am going to put you out tonight and put you out in the rain without an umbrella.

I kid you not because you deserve to get wet to sit in a place where the power of God is flowing, where the worship of God was electrifying, and you are sitting there mad with somebody. You better go over there and tell them to forgive you and meet them at Rita's and buy them a water ice. Because many of the things that you want from God, you do not have to have a hand laid on you. If your heart is right, you can just grab it out of there.

So Paul says to them in 1 Corinthians Chapter 2, "When I came to you, I didn't come to you with excellency of speech. I was not a brilliant orator. I was not trying to use $25 words. I wasn't standing before you to impress you with my hermeneutical or exegetical skills. Nor was I trying to impress you with my Pharisaical knowledge of the law." But he makes this fantastic statement. He says, "I determined. I made up my mind."

It is not necessary to keep making fancy sermons and then leaving people dry. You do not need to impress people anymore with your skills of communication. Folk need to be exposed to power. It is time to take the cover, take the insulation off the power cord, and expose people to the power so they can get shocked. It is time. It is time. That is what these services are for. I did not come here tonight to impress you with apologetics and hermeneutics and philosophy.

I did not come here to exegete passages with such a great ability that you walk out saying, "Didn't he preach?" I came tonight to be a faucet so that the divine Lord can pour through me to awaken and arouse your faith. You get enough preaching on TV and radio and in your morning worship services. But tonight is exposure to the power. And you have to be hungry. I can tell who is hungry by the look on your face. I can see it in your eyes. I can see it in your smile.

Paul said, "I didn't come to impress you." Too many of our preaching servants of God, they are just focused on impressing you. "Well, let me go back to the Greek and to the Hebrew and to the lexicon, to the Aramaic, to the Yiddish. Let me talk to you from deep into the canal of God to bring you exciting revelation." Okay, there is a time and a place for that, but not tonight. I do not care if you do not know how to parse a verb tonight, as long as you get delivered.

I call to mind the young man who had been cured of blindness. The Bible says he was born that way. In short, he was born without eyeballs. But that is no match for God. Jesus did not come and send him to Wills Eye. Jesus did not say, "You need to see an ophthalmologist and see if you can get a transplant." Jesus said, "There is nothing to it but to do it." He picked up dirt because dirt is what we were made out of.

He spat in it to put heavenly DNA in it, rubbed it on the man's eyes, then told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. Siloam means "one sent." When he comes back, the Bible says he can see. And the religious people, like the cessationists of today, they will say, "How is it that you can see?" The man said, "I told you it was Jesus of Nazareth." They said, "He is a bad man. Jesus is a false prophet." He did not pay any attention to them.

They found his parents and they said, "Is this your son?" They said, "Yes, this is our son." "Was he born blind?" "Yes, he was born blind." "How is it that he can see?" They said, "He is old enough. Ask him." Because the Bible said they were scared to get thrown out of the temple. They went and found him again. They said, "Boy, how is it that you can see?" He said, "I have told you, the man named Jesus." They said, "And we told you he is a false prophet and he is a liar."

The man said, "I don't know if he's a false prophet or not. I don't know if he's a liar. I don't know if he's COGIC, Assembly of God, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Lutheran, or Catholic. This is all I know: I used to be blind, but now I can see!" And that is how you are walking out of here tonight. Your CAT scan said stage three cancer. God does not pay any attention to CAT scans. He sent His word!

Paul said, "I ain't coming to you giving you all this excellency of speech or wisdom." He said, "But I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness. I had my own struggles. I was shipwrecked three times. I was in the sea. I was whipped with rods. A few times I was beaten short of 40 strikes. Friends forsook me. I have come to you in weakness. And my speech and my preaching was not in man's words of wisdom."

There are things you have got to know about God for yourself. Now, those of you who are going through something, you know God better than those who are too bougie to go through because a relationship is not a real relationship until you go through something to see if you have got the goods to stick with it. Everybody wants a Jesus who only blesses them and keeps them, but you have got to be like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

You have got to say, "Listen, if God does not deliver me, I am going to stand with him. It does not matter what the people around me say. If God does not do it, I am standing with him." Now, what happens? Jesus came down and got in the fire with them. The longer you stay saved, the more you will realize that Jesus will not deliver you from every situation, but he will come and stand in it with you. And as long as he is with you, you cannot be defeated. Tell somebody, "He's with me!"

What's the point in him being with you if you don't test it? Paul said, "Listen here. My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but it was in the demonstration of the Spirit and power." It is an unusual verse. "My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power." In other words, I preached to demonstrate the power of God.

I do not want you falling out and swooning at my preaching. I want you to swoon because you got hit by the power. You can be calm and content when I am preaching, but you cannot be calm and content when the Spirit hits you. Oh no, baby. Oh no, no, no. Here's what he says: "That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the dunamis." That is the word he used there. The dunamis.

He did not use exousia. He did not say "in the authority of God." He said the dunamis, and the best definition for dunamis is self-regenerating power. It is a power that you never run out of. The devil will tell you you are tired and the power is gone. No, no, no. The dunamis does not go anywhere. When you feel low, it gets stronger. Paul found this out when he had the thorn in the flesh, and he tells you what the thorn was.

He said it was the messenger of Satan. It was not an eye disease like most people say. "Oh well, he had an eye disease because he told the Galatians see how large a letter I've written to you." My goodness, they were writing in letters that were over three-quarters of an inch large at that time. If he had to write them bigger, he was just blind. So when he said "how large a letter I've written," it is because Galatians was written by his own hand.

It was the only one of his letters that he wrote personally. So he said, "You people mean so much to me that I've taken the time to write this large letter to you." So he was not sick. But he tells you the angelos, the messenger of Satan, buffet me. And I went to God just like every Pentecostal. I went to God and said, "Take it away. Take it away. Take it away." Three times, "Take it away."

They only give you three times to use your Matt card before they keep it. You do not know the PIN number. They will tell you you have got two more times, then they eat up your card. Then you have got to go prove with license and other types of identification. He went to God three times. God said, "No, I am not going to deliver you." I love this. Paul said, "If you're not going to deliver me, then I'm going to look at it differently. In my weakness, I'm strong."

"If you are not going to deliver me, then I am going to praise you while I am in this." Now, do not get nervous because that is a separate level of maturity. Everybody cannot handle that type of spiritual illumination. If God were to say that to the Christians of today, they would backslide and leave the Lord the next day. "You mean you ain't going to deliver me? I just been watching TBN. They said everybody gets delivered." God said, "Yeah, but they didn't say where I was going to deliver you into."

Today you are Job. And while the book is over 30-some chapters long, history says his trial was only seven months. You just think it was longer because he has a time that he has designated: "I'm bringing you out of this. But when you come out, you are going to be well done." I want your faith to be in the power of God that is already sitting next to you. Not the person. God is in that small space that you left between you and that person because you do not want your legs to touch theirs.

God is right there in that small space. You know how you scrunched over in that seat so you do not touch the person next to you? You left what I call a God space. But if you get the secret of the victory and you reach over and touch that person, and you form a chain of unity, you will see the power blow through this place. And like Solomon on the day of the dedication of the temple, the Shekinah of God will fill this place and nobody will be able to stand up.

So I am preaching for the Shekinah. I do not care about anything else. Not tonight. Tonight I want the Shekinah. Tonight I want bells and whistles. Tonight! There is an inherent power in all of us to tap into, left to us by Jesus. Satan is doing his best to use our culture to push that power down to a place where it is no longer significant. You have grown accustomed to coming to church and not feeling the power. You have grown accustomed to having good church but walking out of here the same way you came in.

You have grown accustomed to mediocrity in your Christianity because someone has convinced you that God does not do great things anymore. How can a great God not do great things? And so we as a people, we have been left in the position of not expecting anything when we come to church. I don't want God to maintain the status quo. I want God to do something new, unique, and different. God is so awesome that he can do something new every day, even though he says there is nothing new under the sun.

God is the only one that can change that ruling and do something new for me today that he did not do yesterday and will not do tomorrow because I serve a big God, an awesome God, a great God, a giant God who has no equal! What he is looking for is one thing. He is looking for one thing. He is looking for one thing, and it's a shame. I feel sorry for him. Over in Ecclesiastes he says, "I called for my lovers, but they deceived me."

How do you deceive God? He said they deceived me. They went back into the city to find what they needed to satisfy their own souls. They chose secular, humanistic thoughts and desires over the flowing of the power of God. Broke his heart. "I called for my lovers, but they deceived me." My goodness. God is calling for people and they won't answer. He is still calling today.

Praise the Lord, everyone. Pastor Lambert here. Now, I want to encourage you to think along these lines. How powerful is our God? Is there anything that he cannot do? Has his power been exhausted when we came to the end of the New Testament times? Does God still work miracles in our time today? As 21st-century Christians, you have so much information being given to you from social media, various Bible teachers and preachers, and there are many people who actually believe that miracles are no longer for today.

Technically, we call these individuals cessationists. That means they believe that the day of miracles has come to an end. Well, here is my thought: How can you call God all-powerful and then tell him what he cannot do? So I am here today to encourage you to think along the lines of getting a miracle in your life. Yes, salvation is a miracle, the miraculous move of God to translate you from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear son. Yes, that is a bona fide miracle.

But there are other miracles that go on: the miracle of life, a woman conceives a child, carries the child to term, the child is born healthy and grows up to accomplish great things for the Lord. That is a miracle. God bringing your children home every day safely from school without any hurt or harm in a dangerous world, that is a miracle. So yes, while there are miracles that we process during the normal course of life, I want to talk to you today about specific miracles that are designed just for you.

Now, you cannot be trapped in the theological arguments and say, "God doesn't do that anymore." What you have to do in order to appreciate the miraculous power of God is take the limits off of God. Stop telling him what he cannot do and just let God be God in your life. Several months ago, I was thinking about the lack of miracles in our churches today. It seems that we've just settled on having things happen without any godly intervention.

So I went to the Lord in prayer and I said, "Father, why is it that we are not seeing the miracles that we saw during the first century and in the later centuries after the Bible was completed?" Now, I am not saying I heard a voice and there was lightning and thunder, but just deep in my spirit I heard the words, "My people no longer believe I can do this." And so I said to the Lord, "I want to help. I want to give the people of God a tool that will enable them to start believing you for the miraculous power of God to be unleashed in their lives."

What came to me was the book *Lord, I Need a Miracle*. And so I sat down and decided which path to take. This particular writing is filled with stories of individuals who have experienced the miracle-working power of God, and it gives you some steps that you can apply to get that miracle in your life. It is not deep; it is not even long. It is a very quick word because I wanted you to be able to pick it up like the Gospel of Mark and just read through it, and then read it again and again until the age of the miracles starts coming back into your existence.

Yes, you can believe God for the miracle of supernatural healing. God still destroys cancer, he regulates glucose in your body, and he will give you a good report so that your doctor will wonder what happened to you. Yes, my friend, you can have your miracle. But you have to come to the reality that you need it. So here is what you want to do: You want to get this book into your hands. You want to learn the principles that I've outlined.

You want to put them into practice in your life so that at the end of the day, you will say, "Lord, I need a miracle. I believe that your power still exists and I want to walk in the supernatural power of the living God." Now, you can be like the woman with the issue of blood who heard about Jesus. It stirs up her faith and she says, "If I can just touch his clothes, I can get my miracle." Well, that same Jesus is here for you today.

And I want to encourage you to reach out, not touch his clothes, but touch him. Touch his heart, touch his spirit, and allow him to touch you. So get a copy of this book, put it in your library. You can just write to us at Bethel Deliverance International Church, you can go online to betheldeliverance.org, or you can go online to Eric Lambert Ministries and purchase your copy of *Lord, I Need a Miracle*. In fact, get several of these and give them out as Christmas presents.

You see, the good thing about this being a Christmas present is that they don't have to worry about size, color, or anything that they might not like. You can read the truths in this book and get your miracle. So I want you to get this book in your hands, and you will find that the miracle-working power of God is still available for you and for me. God bless you. I look forward to hearing from you. Tell me about your miracle, write and let me know, and let me share the love of God with you and rejoice in the knowledge that he still works miracles.

Guest (Male): God still performs miracles today. Learn how he reveals his power through miracles and how it can play a role in your life. Order *Lord, I Need a Miracle* when you visit ericlambertministries.org or call the number on the screen. You will be inspired to grow in your faith and anticipate God's miracle-working power in your life.

Thank you for tuning in to *Climbing Higher* with Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr. of Wyncote, Pennsylvania. We pray that you are encouraged to grow in your faith as you listen to today's message. If you enjoyed today's program, feel free to order the entire message by calling 800-550-3284 and request the item number and sermon shown on the screen.

*Climbing Higher* is a production of Bethel Deliverance International Church of Wyncote, Pennsylvania, located right outside of Philadelphia. If you would like to fellowship with us, please visit our website at betheldeliverance.org or email us at info@betheldeliverance.org. You can also call our church directly at 215-885-2585.

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