Sound of Faith

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Greetings, friends and new listeners. I'm Sharon Hardy Knotts, thanking you for joining us today on the Sound of Faith because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Today's message, "My Father's House," takes us from an eager 12-year-old Jesus who told his parents, "I must be about my Father's business," to the 30-year-old man who performed his first miracle at a wedding and shortly thereafter shocked everyone when he cleansed the temple of the moneychangers in his righteous indignation. And it's time for us, God's sons and daughters, to rise up in righteous jealousy for true worship to be restored and declare, "This is my Father's house."

R. G. Hardy: We've got to be furious with sin in the church. I'm not talking about sin in the world. I'm not talking about sin in the clubs. I'm not talking about sin in the devil's houses. I'm talking about sin in my Father's house. The disciples said, "Whoa, what's got into him? What's up with him?" Amen. And then they remembered. It's time for us to remember that God's house is a holy place.

Amen. They remembered he wasn't just some angry, intolerant, right-wing, holier-than-thou fanatic. That's what the world calls us. And that's what some church people are calling us. I said that's what some church people are calling us. I can understand the world calling us that. But people that call themselves Christian are calling us that. This is biblical, holy outrage—the zeal, the overflowing passion, the righteous indignation of God's house is eating me up.

And it's time for us to say and do like Jesus did. I won't take it anymore. I'm not going to take it anymore. The Bible says in 1 Peter 4:17, "For the time is come when judgment must begin, begin at the house of the Lord. And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where is the sinner and the ungodly going to appear?" He said judgment begins at the house of God. Amen. Jesus talked about people, the Pharisees. You call people to follow after you and you make them seven times more the child of the devil than they were before they hooked up with you.

That's pretty strong to say to religious leaders. Your association with them has made them seven times more a sinner than they were before they ever got in your camp. Because it's worse. Because at least a sinner knows he's a sinner. He's a sinner, he knows he's a sinner. A backslider knows he's a backslider. He knows he's a backslider. And when he gets ready to come back to God, he wants to come to a church that's real.

If he's going to be a phony, then why come back? Why come back? Why come back, backslider, if you can come back and still go to the clubs and still hang out there and still dance with the devil's tune and then you can lay around with whoever you want? You can be a homosexual or a lesbian. Why bother to come back? That's how you get deceived. That's how you get deceived. You're better to stay in the world. I mean, I don't want you to stay there too long; you might croak and it may be too late.

But at least you won't get deceived. Because when a person is deceived, the Bible says because they would not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved, God gave them over to a strong delusion that they may believe a lie and be damned who would not believe the truth. It ain't the devil, it's God. You say God would do that? He said he would. I guess so. Now here's the sad thing about all this we talked about.

In three and a half years, Jesus would have to do it all over again. See, what I'm telling you in John the second chapter is the first cleansing. It happened right away at the beginning of his ministry. He just did the miracle of Cana. This is right up front. Three and a half years later, before he goes to Calvary, he has to do it all over again. And this time it's recorded—don't go there—Matthew 21, Mark 11, and Luke 19.

And this second time he said, "It is written my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves." In three and a half years, it was just as bad as it was in the beginning when he cleaned house. And that tells me we live in the last days. That tells me we're going to have to do this. If you're going to a church where they do not regularly houseclean, if they don't regularly houseclean, you need to get out of that church because it's filthy. It's filthy. It's filthy.

I mean, if you don't clean your house regularly, if you only clean your bathroom once a year, I do not want to use it. I don't want to eat anything that you cooked on your countertops if you don't ever clean them. Or if you clean them with a dirty rag. You know, a lot of folks don't realize they never change their dish rag. They use the same dish rag for weeks and they don't realize there's more germs on that than it is in your toilet if you clean your toilet regularly.

So you need to change your dish towels and your dish rags. If you do a lot of washing, you need to do it almost every day. Come on, it don't cost that much. Spend 20 bucks and get a bunch of tea towels and dish rags and don't keep spreading germs. And some people go to churches where they don't clean regularly, or they clean with dirty dish towels. That's just a pretense. But they're not getting down to the nitty-gritty, or they're not making the people live up to it.

But they got such a good voice we can't afford to put them off the choir. Well, we only got two drummers. If we put him down, then what happens when the other one's working? We won't have no drummer. That's why God made these. It's not enough for somebody to get out here and preach it like I'm preaching it unless somebody's going to enforce it. And when you start enforcing it, people get highly offended. And they will start—you know what happens when they get offended? They start trying to find something wrong with you.

They kick back. They try to say they got to find something wrong with you or somebody close to you or whatever. Amen. Come on, stop being a two-year-old. Come on, own up to it. Say it's not my brother, it's not my sister, it's not the preacher, it's not the choir director, it's me. I need prayer. Pray for me. I want to get right. Jesus said it's my Father's house. I don't care who built it, it's my Father's house.

And he was talking to the religious leaders. Because not everybody going to temple is a child of God. Not everybody going to the synagogue is a child of God. Not everybody going to church is a child of God. Not everybody sitting here in Faith Tabernacle today is a child of God. Not everybody that calls themselves a Christian is really a Christian. And not every church that's got the name of God over it. He said, "Let them that name the name of the Lord depart from iniquity."

For the Lord has this seal on his people; he knows who were his. Amen. I get some fantastic emails that come; they don't come directly to me, they come through the church website. Some of the stuff that comes over there, I just delete it. I think, "Oh, I can't—my brain is too busy with other stuff." But every once in a while, you just get irked. You know, and I started answering this person. That was a big mistake.

When you answer someone who is deceived, you know what you end up getting? Vexed. Vexed. That's it, vexed. I don't care how many scriptures you throw at them, they're deceived. And this person, one of the things he answered back to me—and he just pulled things out of the air. We would be talking about apples and he starts talking about peaches. See, he can't talk about apples anymore, so he brings out peaches.

This is the kind of—and then I should have known then, why are you bothering, Sharon? But you know, I got hooked for a while. Out of the clear blue sky, nobody's talking about the rapture, nobody's talking about any of that. Out of the clear blue sky, he stops talking about what we're talking about and he says, "And so, you believe 30 percent of Christians are going in the rapture. Ha!" And I thought, "Well, first of all, I ain't said nothing about the rapture."

Second of all, where's he getting the 30 percent? What is he talking about? And all I could answer was, "I do not know what you mean by 30 percent, but I do know that not everybody calling themselves a Christian is going in the rapture. But I do know that 100 percent—because he used the word born again—100 percent of born again people are going in the rapture and only they are going in the rapture.

So calling yourself a Christian does not impress me. I want to know if you're born again because if any man be in Christ, he's a new creature. And whosoever is begotten of God keeps himself from the world and the wicked one touches him not. Don't be afraid to stand up for righteousness. The devil will fight you but he can't touch you. He'll lie on you. He'll vex you. But he can't touch you. He said, "My house is a house of prayer."

He told the woman at the well, "The time is come when the Father is seeking such that will worship him in spirit and in truth." Worship is a big deal in churches anymore. It's become an industry all its own. They've got planned out every song they're going to sing, every word and every verse, and you can read it off the screen. And I'm not talking against that. I don't have a problem with putting words up. If you want to teach people the words of a song, that's a great way to do it.

We don't have songbooks. But I got a problem when you never, ever, ever vary from the prescribed outline the service is going to go. The Holy Ghost cannot do a blessed thing. He can't move any way he wants. If it's not on the outline, we're not doing it. That's not worshipping God in the spirit. Amen. You've got to worship him in the spirit and the other part that I've been saying: in truth.

You've got to be right. You've got to be real. Amen. Otherwise, your worship is nothing but blasphemy in the ears of God. Amen. You know these scriptures well. I'll quickly go through them. 2 Corinthians the sixth chapter. He said, "Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers." For what fellowship have righteousness with unrighteousness and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord has Christ with Belial—that's a name for Satan—or what part has he that believes with an infidel?

An infidel is someone who's hostile. They don't believe and they're hostile about it. And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For ye are the temple of the living God. And I want you to take this and I want you to take what we just read about Jesus cleaning out the temple and now I want you to just put yourself in there. He says, "Are you not the temple of God?"

Amen. As God has said, "I will dwell in them and have said I will walk in them." And listen to this: "I will be their God, they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from amongst them and be ye separate," saith the Lord, "and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you." And verse 18: "And I will be a Father. I will be a Father unto you and you will be my sons and daughters," saith the Lord Almighty.

Not everybody calling God their Father is his daughter, is his son, is his child. He said, "Come out of the world and stop touching the unclean things and then call me Father. And then say Abba. And I'll call you my son and I'll call you my daughter." Amen. I'm almost finished here. How many remember a few weeks ago? I don't know, I lost time, but back when I was preaching a lot during a few months ago, I guess.

But I recommended highly that you get this book, *The Spiritual Avalanche*. I'm telling you right now you need to get this book. I don't have time to tell you all about it. Suffice to say it is a supernatural vision given to a preacher, an evangelist, the one who sparked the Brownsville Revival that lasted 10 years in Brownsville, Florida, where literally people came from all over the world and it was on all of the major news networks covered this revival.

And now, later on, he went to Dallas, Texas, and he opened his own church and has been thriving. But he got cancer. He got multiple myeloma, which is very, very deadly. And he was dying and had days to live. His wife was already starting to make the funeral arrangements. And he told God, "God, if it's my time to go, I'm ready. But if you keep me here..." I promise that I will—he's one of those fire-and-brimstone preachers.

He was already like that. He wasn't like telling God he's going to be something he wasn't already. It's not like all of a sudden I got this epiphany of what I got to do. He just asked the Lord to give him more time and he promised that he would preach it. And he pulled through. He pulled through. He didn't die. They said he'd be dead within three days. He pulled through and gradually got stronger and stronger and stronger.

And he would get up in the middle of the night and early in the morning for prayer. And God gave him a vision. It was so real that at first he didn't know for sure if he was actually in the vision. Now I'm not going to tell you all about it, but it has to do with snow, hence the name avalanche. However, the whole point of this book is God was showing him how that all the layers and layers and layers and layers of false teaching in the churches is going to cause an avalanche.

And multitudes of people are going to perish. We're not talking in the world now, folks. We're not talking in the clubs. We're talking about in God's house. You've got to get this book. In chapter seven, he'll tell you a lot of the things that are being taught. Very quickly I'll give you an outline: the prosperity gospel that's nothing but greed; hyper-grace. Grace is a license to sin. It lets them ease their conscience that they're never condemned when they sin. Grace covers everything, they say.

That's the gist of that. Okay, they believe that there's no hell and no final punishment. It's just a figure of speech. Jesus was referring to a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem where they dumped the garbage and burned it, and he used that as a figure of speech, but there's no hell. They deny the authority of God's word, just like Satan said in the garden, "Has God said? Did God really mean that?"

And out of that flows the deification of man. That means instead of man living up to God and the Bible standards, now they make the standards. They judge the word of God by their standards. They judge the word of God by what they think and what they believe. They literally rewrite the word of God to justify their preferences. That's how they can say homosexuality's all right because God is love and he made them that way. Amen.

This is what they do. They teach that anything goes—it goes further than the hyper-grace into something else, and I can't even pronounce the word, it's so big. I can't even pronounce it. But it means in Greek, "against law." That means anything goes. Jesus has set me free. Why should I come under your bondage? Now you tell them that it's wrong to live together, you tell them that it's wrong for homosexuality—they say, "Jesus set me free, I'm not coming under your bondage." Amen.

If you haven't heard it, you will. And this goes on and then they come to universalism. This means everybody is going to heaven. First of all, there's no hell, so you don't got to worry about that. And everybody's going to heaven. You know why? Because all paths lead to God. I know you've heard that one. All paths lead to God? Well, if all paths lead to God, then everybody's going to heaven. And when this doesn't stop there, it goes to the next level.

The next level is universal reconciliation. And they say everybody's going to go to heaven because when Jesus died on the cross—now they at least they're saying Jesus, they're not talking about other paths. They're sticking with Jesus. But they say when Jesus died on the cross, God reconciled the whole world unto himself, and because in Adam all die, in Jesus all live. Now how many know that is scripture?

But how many know it's out of context and twisted? They ignore all the verses about eternal punishment and hell. Amen. And they go so far as to say—and this may seem laughable but it's true, sadly it's true—they believe some even believe that the devil is going to get saved in the end. You need to get this book. Now, I stay in touch with Tony Prizzon—email—it's not a daily, weekly thing.

It's like when the Holy Ghost leads him or the Holy Ghost leads me, we make contact. And so I sent him this book. I had Amazon send it to him. He emailed me; he says, "Sharon, I got your book. I just got it; I'm already halfway through." He was just like driven, driven. I mean, let me tell you something. People who have faced serious illness, people who have faced death, are dead serious.

They don't have time to play. They don't have time to be phony. They don't have time to make friends and influence people. When they have faced death, they are dead serious about heaven, hell, salvation, and the things of God. And let me tell you something: Tony, he can be funny. He likes to joke. He's got a dry sense of humor. He's got that kind of humor that sneaks up on you.

He doesn't tell those goofy jokes. He tells jokes that you have to think about and then you catch it. Because he is very intelligent, very intelligent. And he knows his Bible. And since he's been going through this long, drawn-out illness that he's battling—the same thing, the multiple myeloma, the same thing—let me tell you something, that man is dead serious about God. And I sent him that book as I said.

He told me, "Sister Sharon, you know, I got it and..." and then a few days later, he sent me this email that I feel led to share with you. He had a dream. He says, "Here's a dream worth sharing. It's an experience that started me off on a very somber day. I had gotten up early in the morning as I usually do to pray, about 3:00 every morning. I get up whether I want to or not and pray."

"When I initially woke up, I had had a dream of flying through the sky at approximately 30 to 40,000 feet high. I could see the large masses of the earth and even the shorelines of a certain nation. But there was someone flying just ahead of me and I asked him, 'Where are you taking me?' Actually, he was the reason why I started the fly anyway. And he said that I would see. And then he related to me that I would need to put on some footwear that scuba divers need to swim through water."

"All of a sudden the dream changed and I was swimming through some very, very dirty water that was up to my chin. It was the kind of water you see at the Inner Harbor when all the debris and runoff has settled and piled up in the corner or around boats. It was extremely filthy. I'm talking about putrid here. And I could hear my feet flapping under the water propelling me forward through this wastewater that was very filthy."

Now he's getting down to it: wastewater. You know what that means, don't you? It starts and ends with a "P". Some of you will get it in a minute. "But then while going through this water, I started to go through a door. It was like a large church door and I was a bit puzzled. I went through this large church door and then I woke up." So he woke up and he said, "I began to wonder, and I began to ask the Lord, 'Lord, is this me? Am I really this filthy?'"

And he said he was a bit puzzled, so he went back into his early prayer time. And about an hour and a half later, he went back to sleep. He went back to bed, and two hours after he went to sleep, he had another dream. This time he was with other people, and he began to fly out of the room away from the people. And he began to fly about 5,000 feet above the ground where he could see the terrain much closer.

"And a voice began to speak to me while I'm flying. And he said—he screamed and he cried and the voice cried out. And he began to cry uncontrollably. He said that at first it came out of him with a large, large pitch that he cried out: 'The churches are filthy and full of filth! Mainly the large churches, they're so filthy!'" And he said he began to weep and cry uncontrollably, so much that the dream—he screamed and cried from within at a very high pitch.

He cried so loud, crying uncontrollably. And of course, he said he woke up Vivian, and she was afraid. But then she realized it was something spiritual going on. And he continued to cry and scream without control for a few minutes more before he could actually gain his composure. Obviously, the Lord had just showed him the state of many churches across the entire nation and even the world that are giving the people filthy, unclean, putrid wastewater and not the water of life.

The people are receiving death instead of life. He says, "Maybe that explains why when I first came to Arizona, I went to 17 churches and was shocked by what I found because they were all putrid and preaching false doctrine." It's time for us to get angry and stand up and say, "This is my Father's house." Amen. It's time to say enough of this filthiness.

And if you are so foolish enough to go to a church and put yourself under a church and a ministry and a leadership that's not preaching the truth, then shame on you. You're filthy and you don't even know it. Some of you are saying, "Sister Sharon, I like it better when you preach other stuff." You know what? If you get this one down, if you let the Holy Ghost convict you, if you let the Holy Ghost stir you up.

Because what's going to happen is it takes a while. The layers build up and the layers build up and the layers build up. And you have those who tell the skiers, "It's too dangerous. It's too dangerous. All of the elements are right for an avalanche." But you've got some people that will not listen. It's not going to happen to them. Maybe somebody else, but not them. They know how to ski.

They're not on the bunny hill anymore. They know how to ski. They know the word. They know the truth. They've been saved. And they won't listen. And when they get up there and that avalanche comes. Just recently, we heard within one week several major avalanches—one I think five people died. Six people went up and only one was able to survive. And they were told and they were warned not to do it. Amen.

But some people you can warn them and warn them and they don't care. But let me tell you something: if you're in this church, we're going to keep warning you. We're going to keep telling you. Amen. And if you're going to be in this church and you're going to be on the choir, on the platform, or teach Sunday school or whatever you do—go out on the streets and name Faith Tabernacle, go to the prison under the banner of Faith Tabernacle—you better be right. You better be real. Amen. Don't you bring a reproach on Jesus and don't you bring a reproach on your brothers and sisters.

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Amen. What a powerful house cleaning message "My Father's House". Do you know who your Father is? Jesus did at age 12, when he stayed behind at the temple in Jerusalem to discuss scriptures with the learned doctors of the law. When his frantic parents found him three days later, he calmly replied, "Knew you not that I must be about my Father's business?" 18 years later, a 30-year-old Jesus performed his first miracle at a wedding, a joyful celebratory occasion, but shortly after, he marched into the temple and in righteous indignation threw out the moneychangers and their merchandise, declaring, "This is my Father's house." The disciples were in shock until they remembered the scripture: "The zeal of thine house has eaten me up."

But do you know that just three years later he had to do it again? And that time he blasted them: "You have made my Father's house a den of thieves." Saints, it's time for the true sons and daughters of God to rise up in righteous indignation against the false worship and made-for-money messages being preached today under the pretense of prosperity. If you know who your Father is, it's time to be about his business, and that includes holy house cleaning in the body of Christ—throwing out the false and establishing the true.

"My Father's House" is available on CD for a love gift of $10 for the radio ministry. Order SK163 and mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203. Or go online to soundoffaith.org where you can also order on MP3. That's soundoffaith.org. But to order by mail, send a minimum love gift of $10 to P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203. And if you enjoy the radio messages you're hearing, why not consider sending a larger gift to help us support the time on this station? Request SK163. Until next time, this is Sharon Hardy Knotts saying Maranatha.