By: General Deborah Green
PRAISE GOD! Today we are privileged people. We are privileged people because we serve the Living God. You know, I was thinking about it last night, how that we have been guilty, not just us, but generations behind us and behind them and behind them, how we have been guilty of sealing God off and putting God inside of this [the physical book of the Bible], and saying this is all of God when God is infinite and God is endless and God speaks to those that have an ear to hear, and God desires that who He is, the essence of who He is, would be in His people. And yet if we even dare to think that God does those things, we’re accused of extra-Biblical revelation. That would be like if I went outside, and I somehow was able to pump me some air into a box, and then I said, “Okay, everybody into the box because this is all of the air that there is. That’s it. And anybody that tries to get air outside of the box is guilty of ‘extra-boxical revelation’.” Extra-boxical revelation! Guilty! And yet, you know what, there’s plenty of air outside the box. But because of my ego, and because of my power, I want everybody in my box, and I want to say that’s all the air there is, and if anybody goes outside of the box to get some air, I say they are trying to get extra-boxical revelation.
And yet that’s what we do to God. Now, I love the Bible, and I read the Bible every day, and I cherish every Word that God feeds me through this, and I believe we need to always keep this which has been recorded, but we can’t say that that’s all there is to God. Now quick, cult-catchers, make a line on that! Because, you know, the truth of it is, God is endless and God is infinite, and we do not have the right to limit our God.
I was thinking, you know, of all of these chronicles in here [in the Bible] and these stories in here and these figures of importance in here. It should not have stopped when they said that was it. Because, you know what? God desires to reveal Himself again and again and again, and when we say that there is an end to God, and He’s inside of this cover; we’re doing the same thing as if we take some air in the box and say that’s all of the air that there is. Do you know how much air there is? Now some air you wouldn’t want to breathe, I admit that’s true. But, I mean, when you’re out in a place like this in New Mexico, when you see how much air that there is and how high the sky is and how endless the clouds are and how many dimensions there are in the atmosphere, you know that there’s a lot of air. And if somebody comes to you and says, “Now listen, Mrs. Green, we’re selling these boxes… and if you get you a box you can have air,” I’m going to think, “You know what, maybe you ought to go to Los Angeles, or maybe to Chicago or New York, or somewhere like that and sell your boxes. Because you know what, we’ve got plenty of air.” And when you come into the freedom that’s found in Christ Jesus the Lord, you realize that God is the Living Word. Amen! I said God is the living Word. And there’s no end to God revealing Himself to His people when they believe.
Now this is part 6 in a series that is entitled “The Necks of Our Enemies”, and I have been taking us through the re-living of a journey that General [Jim] and I took many years ago during which God was teaching us many principles of operation; during which time, God was showing us that He is with those who believe, and that even though there are many people professing that they belong to Him, that they do not believe in Him, and that the enemies will be those of your own household-not meaning just your natural family, but those who are of the household of faith, supposedly, and those who are claiming that they are Christians will oppose the ones who are saying that God is alive. They will oppose the ones that are in the Jesus way. Because why? Because it is the way of the Lord, and men have sought out many inventions, they have sought out many things to say that they know the way, but each one that they have sought out is a perversion of the way of the Lord. Because there’s only one way that leads to the cross, and there’s only one way that leads to the crown, and that is, the straight and narrow way, and that is the way where we believe and have our confidence in Almighty God, and do not rely upon the arm of flesh.
You know, when we make flesh our arm, we take on a curse. And so many times Christians get afraid to believe in God, they think that they’ve got to get this covering, that covering, this arm, that arm, this thing, that thing, in order to do what God has asked. But you know what? We don’t need anything except God Almighty. And when we look unto Him, and believe in Him, He is able.
Now as we have found out in the review, in the re- journeying of this journey, that God does not always do things according to our vain imaginations. Because, you know, we’re all full of fantasy, imagination, conjecture and vanity, and we’ve watched too much television or had too much exposure to worldly Christianity and think that everything has got to be a BIG EXPLOSION, that everything has got to be dynamic, that everything has got to be with men in the preeminence, and when God does things His way, it doesn’t work that way. When God does things His way, He grinds us down from wheat to flour so that He can use us to make His bread. And when He does things like that, and we are crushed beyond measure, when we are crushed beyond what we are and what we can do, and we are made into that flour, we think that everything has fallen apart. The truth of it is, God has taken us from one frame, from one stage, from one entity into another entity, and that is God’s business. And when we learn that God does things His way, we learn one thing-God gets the glory. Praise God!
And in the retelling of this journey, I’m emphasizing the fact that God is miraculous, God is able, God is our provision, God is our safety, God is our shield, God is our truth, God is the way, God is the light, God is the glory, and He is the One that we should magnify. Because God will take the foolish things which we were, and which we are, to confound the wise. And it’s not by any intelligence of our brains, it’s not by any ability that we had or have, but it’s by the power of Almighty, that God brings forth.
Now oftentimes we think in our imagination that things should be this way, that way, or the other way, and we set up in attitudes against God. Now this is the truth. There’s been many people that started out to follow God… they hit with hardship, and somehow it didn’t match up to the Babylonian image of how the Christian life should be; they hit with hardship, they hit with devastation, they hit with rejection, and they gave up. There’s many of you that are listening to me even now as you are reading this teaching: you have been called of God but you have refused that call, or you have turned back on that call because you met up with things that did not “gel” or did not coincide with your vain imagination. And you sit there today rejected, dejected, depressed… why? Because you have refused the call of God.
When God calls us we are meant to do that which God ordains, for God has His manifold purposes in mind. And it’s not up to us to say to the potter, “Hey, make me this way!” because He knows what He wants to make each vessel for, He knows the substance He wants to pour into the vessel, and He knows what He wants that substance used for. So when we yield ourselves over unto God, we find that God will have His way, have His way, have His way! And we have to die to our vain imaginations, we have to die to our Hollywood Christianity, we have to die out to wanting to be approved and accepted of men, in order to please God; because we don’t please God and please men at the same time. We have to make a choice who it is that we love. We have to make a choice who it is that we will serve, and serve Him dedicatedly. Praise God!
Okay, today as we continue in our journey, and we continue in the teaching, we are going to have a quick review of where we have been and where we are going. Now we left off yesterday [in the last message], and we had seen that the cowards attempted to go to the border, and the border was closed. Now the cowards were General and myself, because we had reached a point where we were devastated by the hammering of the enemies, where we were devastated by lack of true fellowship, where we were devastated by self pity, where we were devastated by fear, and we gave in. Now that doesn’t mean that God left us, that doesn’t mean that God turned His back, that doesn’t mean that God was cruel, harsh, and unloving. No, that means that we failed God because we failed to keep our vision single. We began to look at the circumstance, we began to look at the situation, we began to look at the ordeal, and we were exhausted; and we heard the voices of self pity, and we heard the voices of defeat, and we heard the voices of So we discouragement and gave in to the same. turned back, and then God blocked us in our cowardice, and God forced us back into the way that He had ordained.
But as we go through review, we find out that by this time we have been through the mountains of Mexico all the way down into Guatemala. And we’ve gone through Guatemala and El Salvador, we’ve gone through Honduras, we’ve faced the civil war in Nicaragua and gotten through the same. We have gone into Costa Rica where we had the famous miracle of the gas and the empty gas tank, or I should say the power of God and the empty gas tank, and my husband was reminding me that when we got to the place of where the gas station was, that the vehicle stopped several hundred feet before the gas pumps, and that the man that was running the station helped him push it up to the pump, which was proof to us that yes, that thing was empty. That’s why we were praising and magnifying God to such a degree that when we got on the ground where the gas pumps were that God let us see, “Oh yes, your gas tank has been empty… that it has been my mercy.” Praise God!
So anyway, we got through Costa Rica, and then we went into Panama, and Panama was where we were faced up that our imagination was not coming to pass and that we were in the will of God but the will of God was not “gelling” with what we imagined that God would do. So when we took our backwards journey and we tried to escape the will of God, God closed off the border and we were forced to return into Panama, forging our way backwards to the point we had left. But you know, I thank God for that, even till this day, because had we retreated, God could have allowed us to be killed, God could have allowed us to be overwhelmed by enemies, God could have allowed us to lose everything because we were going back into the war zone. So thank God that he kept us in His own way that He had ordained, and as we turned back that very night, we stopped at a little store on the way back, because we were going to have to plead our way into the missionary camp again, and when we stopped at that store, the Spirit of the Lord came down and we had a revival there. I couldn’t say a revival: we had a salvation meeting there, and there were several young people who were gathered around that store in a flock, and as I went into the place and came out of the place, I began to talk with a few of them, and they began to ask me what we were and what we did. And so we just evangelized them right there.
They all gathered around. We preached to them a few minutes, they all repented of their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as Lord. And I don’t remember how many there were, 20-30 of them, all right there. So the Lord, in His mercy, showed to us lovingkindness when we had been the cowards who had ran from the will of God and then God closed the door, turned the cowards back, and then as we were faced up with souls in need, we saw that that was more important than our personal safety, than our self-pity trips, than what we wanted. But the most important thing to God is to see souls redeemed. So we thank God, that God did that for us. It wasn’t by any expertise of our evangelistic methods, but it was by the mercies of God. And all along the way, we saw souls saved again and again and again.
Then after we left that meeting with those youth we went on our way. And by the way, there was one young man in that group that the Lord burdened me for, for years afterwards, because he was a called vessel of God, and I know that God purposed him for that particular meeting, because I believe that he was used greatly of God to win souls in Panama. So God knows exactly what He is doing, He knows how He wants people led to God, etc.
Now in that particular place where we stopped, there was no Protestant movement at all. All they knew there was Catholicism and they knew that there were other people that talked about God, but they knew nothing about what they said. They knew nothing about the Lord except through Catholic ritual, and when they found out that they could personally have Jesus in their hearts and in their lives, they went for it. So God knows exactly where He positions us, at what particular time for what particular souls He wants saved, and that is a beautiful thing.
So after we left that, that night, we were elated in the Lord, we were lifted up out of our cowardly stance, we were lifted up again into the glories of God and confidence in our King. And as we returned, or made our way back to where we were going, we saw a man along the way and he was walking, and we felt that the Lord told us, “Pick him up.” So, you know, you’re never supposed to pick up strangers, especially in Latin America, but we did it anyway.
So we pulled over to the side and we picked him up, and it turns out that the man was a Christian who had been seeking the Holy Ghost for 20 years. He had been seeking the baptism of the Holy Ghost for 20 years! So we told him that it is not difficult, all you have to do is have us lay hands on you and pray for you and the Holy Ghost will come. So he said, “Where can we do this thing? Can we stop right now?” So we stopped right there, we got out by the side of the road, we knelt down in the dirt, and the man received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. And he was so elated and lifted up that God met him in his need. And, you know, you just never know who God has prepared along the way. And I could tell story after story of the Salvations of the in-fillings we saw on that trip because God is miraculous and God has souls prepared. Amen! And it’s not how great we are, but how great He is, and how tender His mercies and compassion are towards the lost, towards those that are hungry, towards those that are needy. Praise God.
So turn with me if you will to Psalms 124, and this is a beautiful addition to what we have been teaching and what we have been declaring in these messages, because we see that it is the Lord who is on our side. It’s the Lord who keeps us in all of His ways. And I’m reading from the King James Version. It says, “If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say; if it had not been the LORD who was on our side when men rose up against us, then they had swallowed us up quick when the wrath was kindled against us: then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul; then the proud waters had gone over our soul” [vv. 1-5].
You know, if you stop and think about that, these waters that he’s talking about are raging waters. It’s raging waters, and it’s saying, “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side that we would have long ago been washed away.” It says that men would have rose, “…as men rose up against us, they would have swallowed us up, for their wrath was kindled against us.” And you know, we were the victims of the wrath of men in their pride, in their religiosity, in their hatred for the true will of God, time and time again. And if it had not been for the Lord who was on our side, we would have been demolished. If it had not been for the Lord who was on our side, we would have been murdered, we would have been robbed, we would have been cast into the sea, we would have been taken into captivity, we would have been imprisoned, we would have been shot down by revolutionary bullets. Many things could have happened to us, had it not been for the Lord who was on our side.
And you know it does us good to recount, to recall, to remember, that it is the Lord who is the keeper of His people, and when we do run into the Lord that He is our high tower, that He is our safety as we taught in the first message in this series that He is the One that we can rely upon, that when we are helpless, and basically hopeless, except for Him, that He can make the way; and that He is the One who is able to keep us in the middle of peril, in the middle of danger, in the middle of tribulation.
Now, going on in the same Scripture, it says, “…the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over my soul; then the proud waters had gone over our soul.” Did you know that a lot of times proud waters will wash over us and they will try to get us out of the will of God? Because God’s will is humility, God’s will is lowly, God’s will is Him in control and us in submission. But sometimes we are flooded by proud waters. We are flooded by proud waters that say, “You don’t have to take this!”; by proud waters that say, “You’re better than this!”; by proud waters that say, “You deserve more!”; by proud waters that say, “Hey, you know, if you went this way or that way, you could be this or you could be that!” And those proud waters have washed many a man, many a woman out of the will of God. But you know, if we cling to God; even when those proud waters sweep over us, that they will not devour our souls, they will not wash us into the sea of iniquity; but if we remain standing upon the rock, our God will keep us. And it is God who gets the glory, it is God that we can keep our confidence in, it is God who does prevail.
And it says, “Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” Now you know this Scripture here is a wonderful manifestation of not only what we went through then, but what we have gone through in the years that have passed since that time. Because many a time wicked men have plotted against us, and wicked women likewise, but the Lord has delivered us out of the snare of the fowler. And when we keep our vision unto God, we are able to say that “If it had not been for the Lord on our side, that we would have perished long ago.” So we just thank God that it is God who is on our side. It is God who will keep us when we are believing and trusting in Him.
Did you know that God finds pleasure in a people who will be vulnerable, in a people who will be in subjectivity, in a people who will be in submission, in a people who are willing to be lowly, to obey Him? And even though the scoffing and the mocking of proud men will come at us, God will keep us from that if we seek our refuge in Him.
So we return back to the point of where we had failed God, back to Panama once again. And as we went back and we slept in the car the first night, then the second night we went to the missionary camp to see if they would be willing to let us in once again, well, they said, “Yes, you can come in, but you can’t stay very long because we don’t want you here, because we’re going to have a meeting.” So instead of inviting us to the meeting, they let us know we weren’t welcome, that we had to get out as soon as the other missionaries came in.
Now you know, we can look at that and say, “Well, you poor things!” or “You pathetic little souls! You little waifs lost out there with nowhere to go and nobody to take care of you and nothing to do but go sleep in your truck!” and we can feel self-pity again. “So we stayed there for a couple of days, and we packed up, and we went over to the border area. We went to the canal zone where we had a couple of friends that we had made in the church we had been attending.
Now we had been going to an A.O.G. church, which if you don’t know the “mighty name”, that means “Assemblies of God”. And in the mission field, if you’re not A.O.G. and you’re from a Pentecostal denomination, then you’re just nobody. Well, we weren’t from any denomination, we were in the “Jesus Way”, so we were doubly nobody. But anyway, we were going to that church for a while, and even in that church God showed us many miracles, not necessarily that they were miracles coming from the church, but miracles coming from God.
Now when we had been several months before in Texas, where I had told you we had stayed at the missionary evangelists’ big church, and where he made offers to us to come into the “Word of Faith” ministry, during that time that we were there, the Lord had called me into prayer one morning. Well, they had a little bitty tiny cottage in that missionary or in that church compound, and you could go there and pray. Well, I went in there because the Lord was on me, was burdening me very heavy. I went in there, and I went into deep, hard travail, and I travailed for some man that I had never seen before. I remember exactly what he looked like. He was an Anglo man, he had blondish-red hair, he had a ruddy complexion, he was middle-aged, somewhat pudgy, not fat but just a little pudgy; he had, like, freckles in that complexion. And I remember I travailed and travailed and travailed for that man, and then I felt the burden lift, as though the Lord had heard my travail, and I felt that the man came through.
So several months later, here we are in an Assemblies of God church in the canal zone, and I’m praying and I look up, and down the aisle is coming the very man that I had prayed for. And so, after the meeting was over, I was shaking hands with different people and I spoke to his wife, and I said, “You know I’m amazed to see your husband because I saw him several months ago in a vision when I was in Texas and the Lord put me under hard travail.” And she said, “Well, I want to thank you because he went through one of the most devastating circumstances of his life at that time and he came through.” So our God is miraculous and our God does hear our prayers, and our God burdens us when we are willing for whosoever He will when He wills. But I know that God used that instance to prove to me that the burdens of the Lord are real, and when we are praying for souls, even souls that we have never seen, even souls we don’t know, even souls that we may never meet, that those prayers are heard by God.
So open yourselves up! That’s what I learned through that: open yourselves up to the burden of the Lord. Do not be ashamed to carry the burden of God, because we don’t know what soul is in the balance, what souls are in the balance between life and death, between heaven and hell, between eternity with God or eternity with the damned. So it is important to bear the burden of the Lord.
And I’ve rejoiced ever since those days that God proved that to me, that He showed me through that man that yes indeed, the burden of the Lord is very real, that yes indeed, those prayers are heard by God, and yes indeed, that God will have us pray one for another in His Body.
And when it was all over, and I had talked to the woman that night, the man came up to me, after I guess his wife related to him, and said, “I want to thank you for your prayers, for,” he said, “I did go through the most devastating circumstance of my Christian walk, and I came through by God’s mercy.” So praise God that we can bear one another’s burdens.
Now another thing that we went through there, as we were going through that church, is we were invited…-well, before we even were invited, we got to hear the preacher preach a fantastic message on salvation, and He preached and He preached and He preached, and it was beautiful, and he talked about Jesus on the cross. He was a young minister and he poured his heart into about how Jesus had lived and died, how that Jesus sacrificed, how that Jesus bled, and he painted Jesus on the cross in great beauty. And when it was all over we went up to tell him how much we appreciated it, and I went up to him with tears in my eyes, and I said, “I want to thank you for that message, because it was indeed beautiful.” And I said that “You gave Jesus good glory.” And he turned to me and he said, “Well, you know, I had to preach that way today because I’m after that Japanese banker,” he said, “because we need to build a new church.”
Now maybe you don’t understand what I’m saying, but I’m saying he was preaching Christ for gain. He was declaring Jesus in such a beautiful way, he was declaring Jesus as the Savior in order to catch the Japanese banker, to bring the Japanese banker that was in the audience into his church that they could get enough money to build a new church. To say that I was shocked, I was shocked, because I didn’t know at that time that we were to preach for gain, that we were to aim to get certain souls because they had a big wallet, but I learned.
So then we began to find out other things in the church. We went to Sunday School, and in the Sunday School they were having a debate over whether they could wear bikinis on the beach and whether they should be able to watch John Travolta and “Saturday Night Fever” [a Hollywood movie], and whether they should be able to drink a little bit to have a little wine “for the belly’s sake”, “for the stomach’s sake”, and we found out that was the main topic of discussion and debate in Sunday School. And they went on to agree that it was okay to go to the beach, that it was okay to enter into bathing on the beach as long as the bikini was not too skimpy, and as long as all things were kept decent and in order. And then the man who was conducting the Sunday School class was complaining that he was vexed and tormented by lust devils every time he went to the beach. And then he went on to give his opinion of “Saturday Night Fever”, and it was okay, as long as we realized that that was of the world. Now why do we want to partake of the world? Then they went on to discuss in the same class that it was okay to have a little wine, because God did not condemn wine drinking. And then I stood up and rebuked them all, because I said, “I came out of deep sin. I came out of devastating sin. I came out of an alcoholic-parent background, and I’m not going to accept the fact that you’re saying it’s okay to drink as Christians.” I said, “I think you’re deceived on that, and I think that’s the devil telling you that because that’s not true.” And then I said, “Furthermore, if you’re plagued by lust devils, why are you even going to the beach and looking at girls in bikinis? Why don’t you stay away from there and spend the day in fasting and prayer?”
Well, I was not popular in the Sunday School class, and I was invited not to return. But the truth of it is, was that particular church was a good church compared to many that we have been in. And it was really sad to see that the Assemblies of God at that time (it was the late 70’s) was puffing up, puffing up, puffing up in its proud imagination that they were so great, so grand, so wonderful.
So after the experiences in that church, one of the ladies in the church invited us to stay in her home, because she had a very nice place, because her husband was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army and had a posh job with the military in the canal zone. They had everything at their fingertips, all expenses paid. She invited us to stay with them because we were homeless. So we’ll get into that the next chapter, as we go on in the journey, finding out that God is on our side. Amen!
