Upper Room Discourse

In our last lesson, we looked at John 14:15-21 and we talked about intimacy with God and how that produces a revelation of Jesus. We saw that there are two types of supernatural revelation. There is the type of revelation where God gives us information that we could not know in the natural, such as word of knowledge and prophesy. And that is very good stuff. But there is another type of revelation that is even better, because it is where God reveals Himself to us. He shows Himself to us.

One of my friends, Gary, has been a pastor for thirty years. Three years ago he was worshipping, and he had been praying, "God I want my eyes to be opened. I want to see." Gary went with me to South America and we worked with a worship leader, Dobby, who had been born with Downs Syndrome. When he was six years old, God healed him. He still has some of the physical conditions but his chromosomes are normal and he has been a great musician and has this worship team. Dobby has been taken up to heaven eight times. He has seen the living creatures and the Lord on the throne like Isaiah did. And my friend Gary wanted that.

The three of us were riding the bus to a meeting. We talked about angelic visitations and seeing into the spirit realm and Gary began to feel desperate. He had been a pastor for thirteen years. He said, "I'm no longer after success in the eyes of man, no longer concerned about the numbers of people I have. I'm no longer concerned how good the people think the programs are. Jesus I just, I just want to see you. I want to see in the spirit realm!"

So Dobby reached over and put his hand on Gary's knee and later Gary got off the bus and prayed for him. That night there were about 3000 people in the tent. Gary and I sat on the front row during worship. Everyone was worshipping God with all their heart -- the 3000 people in the congregation were worshipping and the people up on the stage were worshipping, and Gary was also worshipping. All of a sudden, he looked up on the stage, and he saw angels for the first time in his life. The angels were standing over the dancers and moving with the dancers. And he sees this and he said "Oh my gosh, what is this? I've never... am I really seeing this?"

To be honest with you, for the first several meeting after this happened, Gary thought he might be going crazy -- really losing it. He saw really weird things happening in the meetings, so he'd ask Dabby about the meeting without telling Dabby what he saw. "Dabby, what happened in tonight's meeting?"

We were in Rio de Janeiro one time and Gary told me that he saw angels. "They would come in from the back of the platform and they just went all over, right over the whole crowd!" He said, "I may be going crazy!" So after the meeting, he asked Dabby, "What happened tonight?" And he told him what song was on. And Dabby said, "Well on this one song angels came from behind us and went clear over the congregation." Then Gary said, "I'm not going crazy!"

God is speaking to several people all around the world, and He is revealing Himself to them. He is telling leaders and teachers to cause His people to see the wonderful promises that are so clearly in His word. But it requires obeying Him to receive those promises. And I think the Lord is saying that He wants to move His church into greater intimacy and greater obedience, in order that they may have a greater revelation of Him.

I saw something along these lines happen in September of 2004 in South America. We were doing an outreach crusade at a soccer stadium and we had 22,000 people in attendance. The first two nights, we did word of knowledge (and related healings) first and preached afterwards. We did it in that order because we wanted them to see the power of God and then preach and give an invitation; then we prayed for healing for hours.

But on the second night, God began to speak to the intercessors and give them a theme. I should mention that this very anointed young woman from India was leading them. She's one of the greatest intercessors I've ever met. You've never heard of her because she's been hidden. But God has given her insight intercession that is huge. A lot of people who came with me as my team didn't want to be on the healing teams because they would rather be in the prayer room. All of this revelatory stuff was going on in there. Anyway, they're in intercession and God gave them this theme: "Down with that which is unholy and establish that which is holy."

And that just kept coming across, over and over again. Gary (the guy who's eyes were opened to see in the spiritual) and his wife Kathy were with me on that trip. Kathy came to me and said, "Randy, I talked to five couples tonight who were living together in sin. They're not husband and wife, they're just living together and they don't see anything wrong with that. And they came to me and asked me to pray that they receive God's anointing. There's really a strong immorality in this city."

So when I heard what the intercessors had been getting, and then heard from the field what was happening there, I felt like the Lord said, "Tonight go after sexual immorality. You know it is a stronghold. Come against it." And I told Gary, "I'm going to preach the first half and we're going to tag team and you preach the second half. So I just preached what the Apostle Paul taught about sexual purity, reading from the Bible. And I told them if they would repent, God would give us an open heaven and He will give us a lot more healings than we've seen here the last two nights.

And so I taught and Gary came up and taught on John 15. "If you love Me, then you'll obey Me and I'll reveal myself to you." And then we gave an invitation. At the end of the meeting, the pastor who is over the Four Square denomination in that city said. "Randy, if that had not been anointed, the people would have left." I mean, the anointing was so strong! If we hadn't had the anointing the people would have been offended and they would have left. But because the anointing was so strong, they ran to the front, thousands of them -- shaking and repenting as we called for repentance. We laid a plumb line and said "If you love Me, you will obey Me, and I will reveal Myself to you."

Well, that all came out of revelation. That night we saw three times as many people get healed as we had seen the other two nights.