Upper Room Discourse

When we worship God, we ascribe glory to Him. It is good and right for us to ascribe glory to Him, because He deserves it. When we cry out in that song "Glorify thy name in all the earth," we actually are asking God to manifest His power and presence on the earth with signs and wonders. After all, who can glorify His name (or show forth His glory) better than God Himself? He loves to show His glory in response to our prayers and worship.

One of the ways that He reveals His glory is in His miracles. John 2:11 says, "This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee. He thus revealed His glory, and His disciples put their faith in Him." In other words, the reason that Jesus turned water to wine was to reveal His glory to His disciples. And God never changes; He is the same yesterday, today and forever. If He revealed His glory in miracles 2000 years ago, then He still does that today.

Glory is connected to Power. When you study the writings of the apostle Paul, just do a word study of "glory" and "power," and you will find he often used these words interchangeably. Paul will actually say in one place "raised by the glory of God" and in another place "raised by the power of God."

Scripture tells us that one of the ways God glorifies His name in the earth is by working signs and wonders through His people. God works through us, by His spirit, to accomplish supernatural things that bring Him glory. He did this through the Apostle Paul and through the disciples. Do you think that after Paul and the disciples died, that Jesus no longer wanted the Father to be glorified in the earth? No!

The Lord has raised me into an international ministry. Part of what I do is to have believers travel with me as my ministry team. They pray for the sick at my meetings and crusades, and God heals through them. This experience makes it real to them that God can and will heal through them. So when they get home, they continue to pray for the sick and God continues to heal through them. And that is one what that God likes to bring glory to His name today.

Another thing that I do in my ministry is that I have some young interns who work and travel full time with my ministry for a set period of time. It is really fun having these young interns because God does some amazing things through them and they have some amazing testimonies.

Let me tell you about one of them, a young man named Will. Will felt God calling him to go to Paraquay when he was still in high school. As a matter of fact, he didn't even go to his high school graduation. Instead he got on a plane with Bob, a friend of mine who got in touched with our ministry in Toronto. In fact, let me tell you a little about Bob before I finish Will's story.

Bob is another guy who God touched in an amazing way. He was an Episcopalian and God really got a hold of him. God gave him a heart for missions, so he walked away from a two hundred thousand dollar a year job, sold his boat, sold his airplane. He started calling people on the phone and asking them to go with him. When I preached "Spend and be Spent" (about giving ourselves so God can use us in His harvest) down at Founders Inn at the 700 Club, he was my catcher three different times. He just left it all and started going. And for the first several years he took my sermons and preached them -- which is wonderful. That is what many did who followed Wesley, they took his sermons and just preached then.

Anyway, Bob took Will with him to Paraquay. Will had flunked Spanish twice in high school, but Bob brought him down to this Spanish speaking country. And after a few weeks, he left him there. No one there spoke English -- nobody. But will survived. And after six months, he could speak Spanish. And something else happened to Will while he was there. God began to glorify His name through Will and He started using him in great power. Will was only 18 or 19 years old, but God gave him a very powerful healing ministry.

One day Bob brought will to me. When Bob introduced him, he said "Randy this guy needs to work with you because 80% of the people he is praying for in Paraguay are getting healed." So Will became one of my interns, and he was not even 20 years old. Now he is about to complete his second year with me as an intern and he is married to a lovely girl from Paraguey named Lucy. By the way, Lucy also one of my interns.

Will is in Thailand at the moment with a Christian businessman from Southern California, they are doing some power stuff there. God is being glorified through this young man. Tumors have disappeared, eyes opened, ears opened, people walk that couldn't walk -- and God received the glory for it.

And He wants to do the same thing through you. Will wasn't anything special in the sense that he wasn't valedictorian of his high school and he wasn't "Mr. Preppy". In fact, he was a Gothic before he got saved and when he was first saved, he still ran around with black finger nails.

Picture it -- here's this Gothic guy running around,. He hears the gospel and gets radically saved. And before you know it, only a few weeks later, he was a missionary. Nobody told him that he had to do it differently. Nobody told him that he needed four years of college and three years of seminary before he could go. And that is a good thing, because by the end of seven years of schooling, the fire could have been put out. Instead, he simply went and got the training he needed as he needed it. God does His works through will so that the Father may be glorified!

God is not a respecter of persons and He is willing to do miracles to glorify Himself though any of His children that are willing to let Him. That is what Jesus said in John 14:12 -- "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."