Upper Room Discourse

We are going to look at the Upper Room Discourse from the Gospel of John. This is where Jesus had the Last Super, washed the disciples' feet, and shared some very precious truths with them. Jesus knew He was about to leave the disciples and this is where He shared the things that He really wanted them to know, things that He considered the most important, things that were on His heart. The upper room discourse spans John chapters 13 to 17. let's look at some of those things that were so important to our Lord.

We will start with John 14:10-14: "Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in Me? The words I say to you are not just My own. Rather, it is the Father, living in Me, who is doing His work. Believe Me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in Me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father."

This passage tells us that God the Father is in God the Son and He promised to be God the Spirit and to be in us. Jesus said, "Anyone who believes in Me will do what I have been doing. " He did not say that only those in the five-fold ministry will do what He has been doing. There is tendency for some of us to limit this power to the five-fold ministry, but Jesus said, "Anyone who believes in Me, will do what I have been doing AND greater things than these shall he do because I go to the Father."

What I am sharing with you is not deep, it is right on the surface, it is easy to understand. But the problem is that it is very difficult to believe.

We need to start believing what the Lord is saying -- I want the church to get this from this passage. I don't just want you to "get it" conceptually or theoretically, I want you to get it in deep your spirit. I honestly believe that if we can get the truth, then we can live it. Personally, I have not gotten the full truth of what Jesus is saying here into my spirit yet, even though I have spent weeks just studying it. But I am working on it.

The basic problem we have when we read this passage is that we really don't believe what Jesus says. And because we don't believe what He says, we end up living well below our privilege and we miss part of our destiny. We don't see all that He wants us to see.

The reason why we miss it is because we have difficulty believing that Jesus meant what He said. He gave us a promise -- this promise was not just for the disciples. Jesus did not say this is only for the disciples. He did not say "the Apostles shall do what I have been doing." Jesus said that this promise is for anyone who believes. That means it is for you and it is for me.

I have a friend who was a president of Harrison House Publishing Company in Tulsa. He publishes all the Word of Faith books. He got touched by some people from the Vineyard and became a Vineyard pastor for eight years. He traveled with John Wimber, which meant he got to go into the evangelical world. He grew up in the Pentecostal Word of Faith world, but now he was introduced to the evangelical world. He was appreciative for what he learned in the Vineyard about things that could be blockages to healing and as he applied what he learned, he saw more people get healed than ever before. But he also discovered that the evangelical world was what he called "a culture of doubt."

We evangelicals live in a lot of skepticism and we sometimes pride ourselves on doubt. We are not aware of how much we are influenced by doubt. More and more evangelicals are getting inoculated with revival reports that are starting to move us out of the culture of doubt. But in some of those reports, you have probably heard some things that were hard to hear. When you first heard it you weren't sure you believed it. Am I right? Let's be honest, it is OK! For instance, is it hard for you to believe when you hear that fifty people have been raised from the dead in Mozambique? Just a few months ago it was thirty-four, now it is over fifty. That is pretty amazing isn't it?

One of my hobbies is interviewing people who have raised somebody from the dead -- I have come a long way from my seminary days.

I went to Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. It wasn't considered a conservative seminary back then, it was considered a liberal one. But even as a liberal seminary, they thought anything even remotely supernatural was "mythological." They assumed that any supernatural reports didn't really happen because they did not have room for the supernatural in their thinking. They were convinced that God does not do things like that any more. Yes, He did it back in Bible times, that was historical. But they think the supernatural does not happen anymore. They seem to think that God retired. We call this school of thought "cessationalism."

The thinking is kind of like God has retired. It is also a bit like Deism which holds that God got everything started, but now He has the rules and laws to rule the universe. Since everything taken care of, God just sits back like the wound up clock. Many Christians in the United States claim to be Theists but they are actually practicing Deists by the way they live their lives. They live as if God is not going to be actively involved in their life. But God wants to be.

In reality, God wants to be involved in every detail of our life. He wants to move us into a place of intimacy and closeness with Him. He does not want to stand off from our lives, He wants to draw very near to us and He wants us to experience His touch in our life. And one of the ways that we can experience this intimacy with Him is through worship, because God inhabits our praises. As we draw near to God to worship Him, He comes to us to receive our worship. So, worship is a wonderful way to develop intimacy with God.