One Man’s Kingdom
There are a lot of people who feel self-sufficient. However, self-sufficiency is nothing more than a lie from the devil. The devil wants to isolate you in order to eat you. One night, I was watching the National Geographic channel, and I saw a lion attacking some animals. He seemed to be actually aiming at a special one (quite likely the weakest – the ones that were dropping back, the loners). He passed by some of the strong ones. He did not touch them – they seemed to be too much trouble to handle and he seemed to be seeking the easiest way to get his meal. He was after that loner. Whenever you are a loner, you are setting yourself up to be eaten by Satan. Whenever you withdraw from the assembling of yourselves together, you are setting yourself up to be destroyed. (Hebrews 10:25)
The Lord has ordained that His Body on earth should be run by elders. One does not have to be a keen student of the Bible to know that the order of the Church set forth by God is perpetuated in the multitude of counselors rather then in a one-man ministry. You see, it is human to err and it is divine to forgive. Though it is human to err, you do not have to err, but if you make an error, there are several ways of getting the error fixed. As I am determined not to walk with error, I began to tell the Body to pick me to pieces. I want you to pick up my errors. Anywhere you see an error, pick it up. When you don’t do it, I feel that I have none. Whenever you do not correct me, I feel that I am all right. I have been getting a few corrections these days, and I want to correct every one of these errors. I do not want to be wrong; I want to be perfect. Brethren, our only hope of walking this walk with God is to walk in the Body of Christ.
For forty-odd years I have been preaching this gospel, and I have seen many men fall. Mighty men! Men who I could not walk in their shoes because of the power of God that they walked in. And they fell. It bothered me, so I went to God with it. “My God,” I asked Him, “Why should so and so fall if he has such a high walk? He is walking in such power of faith – why should He fall?”
I found out a secret. The secret is a simple one: if you walk alone you are a dead man. There are none of us who can survive by going alone. If you have a revelation and you say, “This is my revelation and no man is going to take it away from me; I am going with my revelation,” then you are a loser! You are a loser before you begin to fight, because the devil knows that and he is going to put a little kink in your revelation. It will be a good revelation, a beautiful revelation, but there will be a little kink in it; and that little kink will grow and grow like a seed in the concrete, and one day it will bust the whole thing open!
There is another thing I learned. A man who is deceived does not know he is deceived. For if he knows he is deceived then he is not deceived! To be deceived means that you do not know. “Deceived” means that you think you are right, when you are wrong; you think you are strong, when you are weak; you think you are able, when you are not able. Let us humble ourselves before God and walk softly.
The problem with one-man kingdoms is that the gifts that God has given them become their god. They forget the Giver. They take the gift and make a mountain over it. And they build a big organization over the gift. I have seen God calling people and giving them a mandate, but they become proud and careless and begin to take God as a “common thing”. And they lose out with God.
I used to know one of the great evangelists of our time who operated a one-man kingdom. He had some genuine miracles and was not a fake, but there was one major sin in his life he would not let go of. He was defrocked from one of the large denominations for it and subsequently refused correction from brethren who worked with him. Eventually, he established his own Nicolaitan organization. God did not take away the miracles and he became more and more deceived. When he advertised his meetings, the big banners would read, “Come hear god’s man of faith and power.”
One night, after receiving many of God’s warnings with regards to his life through the brethren, he was found dead in a motel room with a bag of money, which was collected the night before. His drinking habit had taken his life. The immune system had sent its last white corpuscle (soldier) to intercept the virus, but it was repulsed for the last time.
The divine ministry ordained by God to correct the Church and keep the Church in order is totally rejected by the churches. Whenever a minister gets a revelation from the Lord that would lift the status of the people of God, he is dismissed and disgraced. We know a sister who belonged to an organized church, who being freshly baptized in the Holy Ghost started to share her new experience with others of her denomination. One Sunday morning in a packed church the pastor called her out, “Sister Mary (name changed) is a disease. We want her removed from the congregation!” Of course, the poor sister almost had a heart attack. He was the disease and the only healthy cell in the Body was attacked. So, they had her removed and the AIDS could prosper.
Proverbs 15:22, “Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established.”
Proverbs 24:6, “For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war: and in multitude of counsellors there is safety.”
