Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Tonight, I would like us to look at two portions of Scripture: first, Acts 18, beginning in verse 24; and then Revelation 1, beginning in verse 16.
Now a Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures.
This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he was speaking and teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus, being acquainted only with the baptism of John.
And he began to speak out boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.
And when he wanted to go across to Achaia, the brethren encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him; and when he had arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace.
Apollos is first mentioned here. Later, he was used to help build up the church in Corinth.
In His right hand He held seven stars; and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength.
When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.
“Therefore write the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which will take place after these things.
“As for the mystery of the seven stars which you saw in My right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.
“To the angel of the church in Ephesus write.”
We will stop there for the moment.
Our Father, we come to You tonight after a full day of fellowship and ministry, so thankful for Your mercies to us. Once again, we apply to You and ask that You would quicken us—body, soul, and spirit—as we are in Your presence. Refresh us, and help us to receive Your will, Your life, and Your light.
We are thankful to be together. O Lord, make this a profitable time for all of us. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
The matter I wanted to share on in my time is this matter of ministry arising out of heavenly vision. I imagine all of you know that this reference comes from Acts 26, where Paul was speaking to King Agrippa and said, “O King, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.”
Heavenly vision is the matter we are talking about tonight. Praise God, we are all together as members of the body of Christ. This is the body of Christ, and we are individually members of it. Each of us, in our membership, has some grace to give to build up the body of Christ.
When we speak about being servants of the Lord, we are also involved as servants of the King in His kingdom. As Peter reminded us in 1 Peter 2, that which was spoken to Moses in Exodus is true:
You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that you might give praise to Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.
On the one hand, we are members of the body of Christ, sharing life with one another and allowing the body to grow by itself in love. But the Lord is also looking for those who would be faithful servants—servants of the Lord in His kingdom.
This brings us into a larger sphere. It has to do not only with serving in little ways, such as cooking in the kitchen, as we heard this afternoon, but also with the greater ways of ministry that build the church: traveling ministries, service in the church, preaching the gospel, and standing in prayer as we pray for the kingdom of God to come on earth.
There is a dimension of being servants of the Lord that I sometimes wish were emphasized more. Especially in these last days, we are dealing with the situation of the Laodicean church, where so many servants of the Lord are serving in lukewarmness and out of the riches of the internet, rather than out of a heart that has heard from the Lord.
Because the church does not realize in these last days that we are poor, wretched, blind, and naked, we actually think the church is doing well. I wonder what percentage of messages come from the internet.
One brother said he cheated and got one off the internet. We have devotions every day in our fellowship in Manhattan, and every once in a while I hear something and think, “Boy, that guy picked that right out of the internet.”
Well, the internet is your new pastor.
But the Lord is looking for something more: servants who know Him the old-fashioned way—talking to Him, not going to books or the internet and all of that kind of thing. There are many ministers, pastors, workers, teachers, elders, and deacons, but I want to speak tonight about holding to the standard of the heavenly vision.
All of you are servants of the Lord, or you would not be here. We are thankful that every servant of the Lord must go through the same school of Christ. He is the Teacher, and one way or another, we will learn the lessons of the school of Christ.
Perhaps you are in the classroom with Christ our High Priest, still learning that your sins are forgiven by His precious blood. But our High Priest is waiting for something: our full consecration, where we present our bodies as a living sacrifice before Him, the High Priest, and our members as instruments of righteousness.
When we consecrate ourselves to that High Priest, then the fire comes down, and the Holy Spirit empowers our life. It is so important to go to that classroom of the High Priest and learn how to serve Him in the power of the Holy Spirit.
But we also have another class: Jesus the Master. This is the yoke-fellow class. In this class, we learn from Christ how to work with Him in a yoke, where He is on one side and we are on the other.
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.
There is so much to learn, and His way is usually not our way. There is a humiliating, humbling process in learning how to serve the Lord with the Lord in your yoke.
But it is a good class to be in—the class of the Master—because He is so humble in heart. He will give rest to your spirit as you learn from Him in this way.
Of course, everyone must also go to the classroom in the school of Christ crucified. In that class, we learn that our flesh avails nothing. We learn that even our best and noblest efforts will not get there.
We learn to see and recognize that we need to live out of Christ crucified—out of His victory and out of that resurrection life that comes when we have been crucified with Christ.
This is such an important lesson for God’s servants because, in ministry at large today, many servants of God are getting absolutely burned out before they are fifty years old. Their energy is expended trying to serve God’s people out of their own strength. It is an impossibility.
So it is a good thing that we are in the school of Christ, isn’t it? No matter what classroom you go into, there He is again. It is the same Lord who wants to teach you. He is very jealous about teaching His servants how to serve, so we can expect to find Him in every class.
Before we go any further, I want to ask you a question: Have you really owned up to being His bondservant, or are you a volunteer?
You remember how Jesus said that a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, but a volunteer, when tough times come, jumps over the fence and takes off.
There are many Christians who love the Lord, but I do not know whether they have really owned up to the fact: “I am a bondservant of Jesus Christ, and whatever He says, I will do.”
Until we own up to that fact and are not ashamed of it, we tremble to say, “I am a bondservant of Jesus Christ,” because only Paul says things like that. We feel unworthy to say it. But that is our position. Do we own it? Do we stand humbly in it?
I remember one time, several years ago now, when our brother Lance Lambert came to Manhattan. We were a scrawny little group, maybe twenty-five or thirty people. He spoke to us so mercifully and wonderfully about the Word of God.
Afterward, we were standing around, and I happened to be near Lance. One of our young men came over. You know, young people have the freedom not to respect older people.
This young man came by, being a little bit of a wise guy, and said, “So, what are you doing when you are not preaching? I mean, what is your real job?”
Lance quickly became serious, and his face flushed. Do you know what he said? “I am a servant of the Lord.”
He said it with a strength that almost blew the young man backward. Of course, the young man was just being a wise guy, but Lance was deadly serious. It turned out that he did not have many years to live before he went to glory, but he stood as a servant of the Lord.
That is what he called himself—not an apostle or teacher. “I am a servant of the Lord.”
Have we owned up to that? Have you owned up to that?
There comes a time in our lives. Perhaps you do not know exactly what your calling is, but has that calling reached your heart? A crisis will surely come in your life, just as it came into the lives of the disciples, when they said under duress:
Lord, we have nowhere else to go. You alone have the words of life that we need. Where else can we go?
Do you remember when the disciples said that? That was a major road marker. There is no going back once you say that. Now you are connected to the Lord, and you press on.
So this is my question to you: Have you owned the fact that you are a bondservant of the Lord—not a volunteer, not even a part-timer?
When we speak of being a servant of the Lord, somehow in our minds we think, “Now he is talking about full-time men, full-time ministers.” But no: every child in the kingdom is also a servant in the kingdom.
No matter how little the service may be, when it is done with all your heart, you receive the reward of a good and faithful servant. So, have you owned it? If the young people in your church ask, “Who are you?” do you say, “I am a servant of the Lord”?
Maybe we need to recover this and not be embarrassed by it. When we are truly servants of the Lord, my, my, how He loves us.
Your calling to be a servant of the Lord is what we are discussing as we begin tonight. The calling is much more difficult for you than it was for me, so I am going to share a little of my story.
It is God’s mercy that I am even here talking to you, because I came from such a different place from where I feel most of you came from. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. My mom and dad were not believers. My dad was a psychiatrist, and my mom was an opera singer.
I grew up in a very proud household. Of the three children they had, I was the proudest of them all. I was very popular in school—popular in sports, a popular class-president kind of fellow, popular in the drama club, popular with music. I was just popular.
I knew I was about the best person in the high school. I was not sure, but when I went off to college, sure enough, I was popular there too. I was full of pride, full of myself, and full of foolishness.
It is too much of a story to tell you how I met up with my foolish wife. She was a backslidden Christian who married me, a non-Christian. But in the mercy of God, she had wonderful, godly parents. Basically, her dad led me to the Lord.
Then I saw my mom get saved, then my dad get saved, then my brother get saved, and finally my sister got saved. It was total mercy.
While they were getting saved, I was still smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, still had an untamed tongue, and was still very proud. But the Lord has to take some people who are the vilest offenders who truly believe and set a couple of them up as an example.
All of you are the goody-goody goodies who got saved because you found out you were sinners. I knew I was a sinner, but I did not know that “the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.”
To get the ball started, I was saved in the context of a denomination. I was a Southern Baptist. That was what my father-in-law was, that was what my wife was, and therefore that is what I became.
It was easy for me to hear my calling. I heard it about a year after becoming a Christian. I started preaching a year and a half after becoming a Christian, and I was a pastor two years after becoming a Christian. They set you up: if you say you are called, they ordain you, send you off to seminary, and you study and learn.
By the time I got through seminary, I became a missionary. This may sound strange to you, but to Southern Baptists, if they are going to send somebody up to New York, that is mission territory. So they made me a missionary.
My wife and I went through all the stuff. They screwed a halo onto my head. I was Reverend Dana Condon. They sent out the missionary.
The Southern Baptist Convention has a convention of fifteen thousand people every year. It is like the Democratic convention or something like that. I was one of the speakers. I was a young man of promise.
I do not know what happened, but I had become a pastor and a lot of people got saved. You know what I mean—that makes you a hero in the Baptist book.
So it was easy for me to know the calling because there was a simple denominational way. Here you are. But nobody is telling you that you are a pastor. Nobody is sending you to school. You are having to hear from the Lord. You are having to obey His voice.
You have to ask God for grace to serve for no money. I got paid.
I see the responsible brothers in our fellowship, and you could not pay me for that job. They do not get paid, and they spend a lot of time praying, talking to people, and doing everything involved in the work.
You do not have an outward position that has to be undone. You are going to have to learn all these things from the inside out.
Here is what I have discovered. I have been around a long time now—not as long as some, but a long time—and this is my conclusion: the Lord did not make a mistake. His training school for raising up servants of God is the house of God.
There you truly find and discover your calling, your gifts, and your heart. You give to the Lord out of your love for the Lord. This is a much better way than going off to seminary and coming out with a ministerial mindset—that you are the leader and everybody is going to follow you, and all such kinds of things.
My burden is to share the necessity of a heavenly vision for ministry today.
I inwardly sensed the calling of God, and I suppose, as it turned out, He was calling me, though I misunderstood and went this way and that for a while. The Lord was calling me, but I had no heavenly vision. I had what you would call a Baptist vision.
Every group and every organized church has a sort of vision: the way they do things, what they believe, and their parameters. Much of it was scriptural. I was a pastor, an evangelist, and a minister of the Word. We stressed evangelism.
Even as a young Baptist pastor, I read some good literature. I remember being in a Baptist church when I could not have been a Christian for half a year. There was a rather strange fellow who came to the back of the church. He wore a trench coat all year long—summertime, wintertime, the same old trench coat.
One day, after the service, I walked out as a brand-new Christian. He opened his trench coat and said, “Here, I have some books for you.”
I was six months old as a Christian and still in college, and he gave me The Normal Christian Church Life by Watchman Nee. I have never been so blessed by a book in all my life.
When I saw that book, I immediately thought, “Well, that is the way it should work out.” Everything he said, he gave Scripture for. It was very different from the Baptist way, as I saw it.
I received a lot of good teaching. I went to Keswick conferences and heard teaching on the deeper life. By the time I had been a Christian two or three years, I already knew the matter of having been crucified with Christ and Christ living in me.
I was blessed by the environment I was in, hearing all these things and doing all the things. But I had a problem, and that is why I use Apollos as an example. I am nothing like Apollos, but we did have one thing in common: a limited vision.
Let us look at Apollos. While Paul went back to Jerusalem, Priscilla and Aquila landed in Ephesus. They opened their home for fellowship and for people passing through. At that time, Paul had not started the work in Ephesus. There was no church there as such; the believers met in a synagogue.
Sure enough, one Sabbath along came Apollos. What a mighty preacher of Jesus! He came into that synagogue and stirred things up. He had a reputation for doing this. He was mighty in Scripture, he had eloquence, he preached the gospel, and people were saved. It was a wonderful thing.
Priscilla and Aquila were so glad to hear him preach, but when they heard him, they knew something was missing. It could have been something very obvious. He only knew the baptism of John.
Very possibly, these new converts to Jesus the Messiah were baptized in John’s baptism. Perhaps they asked, “Well, what do we do now?” and he told them, “Go back to the synagogue, worship Jesus your Messiah, and tell them about Jesus the Messiah.”
When Aquila and Priscilla heard him preach the gospel, perhaps Apollos stayed in their home. They took him aside, it says, and showed him the way more accurately. Then he wanted to go to Greece, and Aquila and Priscilla wrote letters and said, “Oh, you have got to go.”
What was behind all this? Aquila and Priscilla had heavenly vision. They saw the church of Jesus Christ. They saw Jesus Christ in His church.
How? They had been there when the church was built by Paul in Corinth. They had opened their house there in Corinth. But the thing was, they saw the living church—Christ Jesus, the organic reality. They saw the body of Christ ministering. They saw the Holy Spirit moving in oneness through the body of Christ in Corinth.
Aquila and Priscilla said, “Let us show you the more accurate way. Did you know there is a baptism of the Holy Spirit?” He said, “What?” They said, “Yes. The Holy Spirit baptizes you into the body of Christ.”
“The body of Christ? What is that?” They said, “It is the church of Jesus Christ. You are now connected with it in spiritual unity.”
They probably told him much more. Priscilla knew what she was doing. Aquila stood around and said, “Do you want more coffee?” I think Priscilla probably had the goods. Priscilla preached to him and told him the more accurate way.
He immediately wanted to go to Greece. Why? To see this thing, which actually was not happening in Ephesus yet.
When Apollos got to Corinth, can you imagine what he saw? He saw people being led by the Holy Spirit. He saw the body of Christ. He saw that some were prophets, some were teachers, some were speaking in tongues, and some were interpreting. “What is going on?”
He saw Jesus—the Jesus he had been preaching. Now he saw Jesus in the body. It was revolutionary for Apollos.
So he stayed on in Corinth and greatly helped the saints. Now that he saw what the end was, his preaching could be directed properly—not merely bringing Jews into a synagogue as Messianic Christians, but bringing them into the body of Christ by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, where they could function in this new organic temple of God.
What a time that must have been for Apollos!
For me, I had seen many revelations. I read every book printed by Watchman Nee and CFP, and every time one came out, I read it. You cannot read that material with a heart for the Lord, as I had, and not see revelation.
But the difference between revelation and vision is this: I had revelations of Jesus, but there was no vision that had me.
When you receive heavenly vision, it grabs you. You can receive revelations, but vision takes you.
I was not there yet. I saw precious things about the body of Christ. By then, I had left the Baptist church—another story—and I was the pastor of an interdenominational church. I tried to put into practice all the methodology in The Normal Christian Church Life and things like that.
It was not working so well. As the pastor, I was directing and ordering everything, trying to get things going. But I still had not seen that heavenly vision, that comprehensive vision which makes you understand what the Lord is doing overall.
What is the Lord doing? I really did not understand.
The fact is, this heavenly vision that Paul said he was not disobedient to—there is only one vision.
Isn’t it interesting that in Acts 2, when it speaks about the early church, it says that the church continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching—singular. Sometimes Peter spoke, sometimes James spoke, sometimes Nathanael spoke, but it made no difference. The apostles all had one teaching.
It was this: “Let me tell you who Jesus is. Let me tell you what Jesus has done. Let me tell you what Jesus said.” It was all about Jesus, focused in Jesus—speaking of Him seated on the throne of God and speaking of the church.
It was one apostolic teaching because they were all under one vision. There was unity there. Heavenly vision is a unifying vision.
I was not there yet. I had not seen this comprehensive heavenly vision. What is that heavenly vision? Do you know? Have you ever seen that comprehensive, overall vision that enables you to understand what God is doing?
I knew Christ was Lord, Lord of all. But I had not seen Christ in a vision like Isaiah saw Christ sitting upon the throne. I knew the church was His body, but I had never seen that incorporated together in Christ as part of that vision. I had not heard my call within that plan.
You can tell when someone has received heavenly vision because restraints are put upon his life. As it says, without a vision the people are unrestrained, or perish. When you receive vision, you come under restraint.
You do not simply do whatever you want anymore because there is a vision determining what you should do. Right? As I say, I was not there yet.
I am going to spend a couple of minutes talking about Baptist vision, because most of you have no idea what I am talking about. You may think I am speaking in tongues, because thankfully most of you come from a Christian testimony church or something where you have experienced and touched something of God’s eternal purpose.
But I was a Baptist, and that was my experience. I was the pastor in a Baptist church, and that involved all the usual things. The buck stopped with me. I made all the final decisions, and I got the money.
Sunday morning came. I got up, the congregation was there, and I greeted everyone. Then I said, “Let us invite the Lord into the meeting,” and I prayed the invocation.
After that, I selected a hymn according to the message I was going to preach, and we sang a hymn. Then I prayed especially hard for the offering.
After that, I preached the gospel and gave an invitation. In the Baptist church, we gave an invitation for people to come forward every Sunday. Then I prayed the benediction and ran out to the door so I could shake everybody’s hand as they went out.
That was the normal way.
Later on, I became part of a full-gospel church. Now I had my guitar, and I led worship for half an hour—song after song. I picked a song and everybody sang. We stood up, praised God, and rang and rang and rang on the guitar.
Then we prayed, I preached the gospel message, gave an invitation, played a song, and we all went home. So it was still basically the same thing.
Most people would say, “Well, what is wrong with that?” God blesses that. When there is a good preacher, God blesses it. But what is wrong with that?
I had no idea. If you had asked whether I sensed anything wrong with it, I suppose I would not have admitted it. But the truth was, it was my show.
I would always say, “I am the undershepherd. Jesus is the Shepherd.” But everybody still called me Pastor Dana.
What was wrong? Here we go. Listen: Where was the body?
I did not see the body. I was the body. I did everything. But I was the paid man, so I had to pray the invocation, pray the benediction, give the message, and give the invitation. Where was the body?
There were dear saints sitting here and there, many of them giving sacrificially. Then we came to Wednesday-night prayer meeting. I opened the prayer meeting, we sang a hymn, and I preached on something about prayer.
We mentioned items about people who were sick, then I prayed, and perhaps a deacon joined in, so there was some body life there. Then we had a final prayer and went home. That was prayer meeting.
My dear saints loved the Lord, but they did not know how to pray in public. They did not know how to pray.
Maybe this sounds strange to you, but that was the normal thing I was involved in. There were so many man-made methods that I had no idea of all the things going on, all the ways we used the flesh.
I remember when Ernie Heil and I were back in seminary. We had to go to preaching class. Let me tell you two things about preaching class. Everybody learned how to preach. There were different kinds of sermons, and we read sermons.
Then one day, one of the famous Baptist preachers came in and gave us a secret: a scroll. It was his sermon topics and Scriptures for the next fifty-two weeks of the year.
It was wonderful. He had Easter, Christmas, all the seasons, revival time in the fall—which came every year—and sermon messages for all of it. It was already planned out, and he gave us a copy. I was set for the year.
Now, what happens if God wants to say something else? Ah, well, then we may have some trouble, right?
When the Hebrides revival hit Scotland, Lance, his sister, and a group in his Baptist church in England went to the pastor, Alan Redpath, a famous pastor. They said, “Pastor, we want to see a revival like that in London. We need to have special prayer meetings and pray for revival in London. Can we do that?”
I will never forget: Lance said that Pastor Redpath replied, “It will take us six months to clear our church schedule so that we can have prayer meetings for revival.”
You may say this is crazy, but I am telling you, this is normal. So much goes on like that.
Meanwhile, you preach the Word, people are helped, and people get saved. We stressed evangelism, being filled with the Holy Spirit, revival, the deeper life, family worship, and all kinds of things. So it was not all bad.
But the vision was so limited. I was very busy, like Apollos, but I did not have heavenly vision.
If you had asked me, “What is God’s eternal purpose?” I would not have known how to answer. I had never heard that question before, even though it is in the Bible. I did not know it was in Ephesians.
I probably would have said, “Jesus is Lord of all.” That is probably a pretty good answer. Or perhaps, “God’s eternal purpose is getting people saved.” That is a winner right there. But I could not really answer the question.
Enough about all the things I was doing the wrong way. Let me tell you about God’s mercy.
Somehow, I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and came into the orbit of our dear brother Stephen Kaung and Brother Lance Lambert. That was my undoing.
I remember one of the first messages I heard from Lance. He said, “Do you know what is going on today all over the world? Everybody has a partial idea about the church and what it is like.”
He said people think the church is like a car. Some say, “You need the body outside. You need to change the paint and make it look nice”—just like the church building. “We need stained glass, better carpets, and these things will draw people.”
Then another fellow says, “Forget it. We need to preach being born again and get people saved. You need an engine. What good is a car without an engine?”
Then the Pentecostals come along and say, “No, you need gasoline. You need the power of the Holy Ghost to come down. People need to get filled. We need gasoline.”
Then somebody says, “No, no, no. Before we take this car anywhere, we need to read the owner’s manual.” These are the deeper-life Bible teachers who like to teach all the things in the Bible.
Lance said, “Here are all these people vying for what is most important. But what happens if somebody comes up and says, ‘Where is that car going?’” Nobody had any idea.
When I heard Lance give that illustration back in 1975, I had no answer. I could have said, “Oh yes, the church is going to heaven.” But I did not understand the purpose of the whole thing. Where is it going? I had no idea.
By then Lance was already sticking daggers into me. I was like a wounded bull. But our brother Stephen had to drive the sword in, being the torero that he was.
I was in Raleigh, pastoring a church there. But there was a small group meeting where Brother Stephen came every month and spoke to twenty or twenty-five people about higher things.
One weekend, he spoke from Revelation. He spoke from the Scripture we read about John seeing the vision of Jesus in the midst of the lampstands.
He put Jesus in the foreground and said that the seven lampstands were in the background, because Jesus is the center of that whole vision.
Then he said that the lampstands were all gold—pure gold. There was nothing but gold on those lampstands, and Jesus was looking at them.
Perhaps you have heard that message before, here and there. But something happened to me the night after hearing it. I went home, and I saw Jesus in the midst of the churches, looking at my church.
When I saw that, I saw, as it were, with His eyes and His flaming fire, all that was wrong with the church. I saw my flesh. I thought it was my church. I saw so many things wrong and being done the wrong way.
I cannot even explain all that I saw, but what happened to me was that I died. I saw that I was completely wrong.
I was the pastor of a church, and I was completely wrong. I had no idea that He was building a golden lampstand. I had no idea that He wanted it all to be gold, with no compromise.
I had read things such as The Normal Christian Church Life, but like many ministers, I said, “Oh, this is wonderful, idealistic teaching. But of course we know there is no perfect church.” Based on that, we compromise.
“You do it the Methodist way, I will do it the Baptist way; you do it whatever way—just so long as people get saved.”
But I met a Lord that night who said, “No. Not your way—My way. I want a lampstand of pure gold. I do not want any compromise.”
That changed my life.
As I began to see more, the Lord showed me His beautiful church. It was like the Scripture in Hebrews that says Abraham walked through this life looking for that city whose Builder and Maker was God.
It was as if I saw the church whose Builder and Maker was God. I saw the perfection of it, and it was so beautiful. This was what I wanted to see. This was what I wanted. But I had to die.
That little group in Raleigh had no idea what was going on. I came down to that group and tore up my ordination paper in their midst. I resigned as pastor, started substitute teaching school, and had to learn all over again.
At that moment, I had to say, “I see what God is after. I have no understanding of how to get there. I am so full of the flesh, my ways, Baptist ways, and ministerial ways.”
The Lord basically said, “I am going to take you out of the ministry.” Actually, I have never gone back.
I got severely burned in that experience—severely burned. My whole career was over. My pastor’s annuity was gone. My career was gone. You study eight years to be a pastor, and it is all gone.
I am so glad I did.
Slowly and surely, the Lord began to show me what He wants.
I know I am saying this, and there are many people in various churches. All I can say is, God bless them. The Lord blesses a good preacher of the Word. The Lord blesses people who want to be holy. The Lord blesses these churches to the degree that He can use them.
Usually, it is a matter of the parameters of the vision they have. Some that are more biblical have more vision; others, not so much, are deeply compromised.
But no matter the condition of those churches all over the world, the Lord has overcomers in each of those groups. Somehow, they are faithful to the Lord.
If a church has a gender problem and all these things, there are still overcomers who are faithful to the Lord. They serve in small ways. They teach Sunday school. They do all these things, and the Lord is going to reward them.
So I have no beef with all that is going on around me. But I heard the Lord say, “Dana, I want you to be part of something whose Builder and Maker is God. Do not take anything less.”
That began to be my restraint.
Of course, because I was a big fellow and a preacher, people thought I was good. So I got invitations to pastor churches elsewhere. “Oh, listen, brother, we need you over here.” But I could not do it. I just could not do it.
This was my way: I had to say all the time, “Jesus, what is Your way? That is where I want to go. I want to go in Your way.”
As a result of this revelation, one thing became very clear to me. It may sound new to you, but it is not new at all: I saw that God needs angels.
To the angel of the church in Ephesus write.
So on He goes as He speaks to the seven churches. God needs angels.
Who are these angels? I know there are different opinions, and I will not get into a doctrinal argument. But to me, they are human beings—not angel angels, but human beings.
They are human beings who are part of the local church, whether Ephesus, Laodicea, Sardis, or wherever. They are brothers and sisters. Perhaps they are in leadership.
But as you see the decline among the seven churches, getting worse and worse, perhaps they are no longer in leadership. Yet they are brothers and sisters in His house who are willing to listen to Him, repent, and repeat what He is saying to the church.
The Lord loves overcomers, but even overcomers need to understand what is wrong before they can overcome. Right?
If there is no angel in the church of Ephesus, how will you know that you have left your first love? There must be somebody in Ephesus with sensitivity of heart who says, “Something is wrong. Something is wrong.”
Everybody else may be saying, “No, no, we are doing great things. We are serving God, preaching, being faithful, and finding false apostles.” But somebody says, “No, something is wrong,” because their heart is listening to the Lord in the midst of all the clatter.
God wants angels—people who see the lampstand.
I do not know how you picture this, but I do not see those seven lampstands in isolation. There is a whole house of God around them. But Jesus is focused on that pure-gold testimony. That is what He wants.
There is no perfect church. There is no perfect church. But there are those who want to hold that faithful testimony of Jesus without compromise because they have seen Jesus without compromise.
Others do not see it. The Lord is looking for angels who hold the testimony of Jesus.
Could there be anything more wonderful than for Scripture to say of the apostle John that he was on the isle of Patmos for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus? Now that is an angel.
John was an angel, and he was allowed to see these things because angelos, the Greek word translated “angel” in this Scripture, simply means messenger. That is all it means. It means messenger.
The Lord needs messengers, but these messengers need heavenly vision. They need to understand God’s eternal purpose, or they do not know where things are going. That is the blind leading the blind.
What if they had a fight in the church of Ephesus over what was really wrong? “Are we not finding enough false apostles? Are we not being faithful enough?” All the while, they had left their first love.
God wants angels who can prophesy God’s heart, who are faithful messengers to whatever the Lord says. You may be very unpopular if you are an angel, but will you say what the Lord says?
There is a great price for that. Do not forget that Jesus goes on to say:
Let him who has an ear hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
The angels speak to the church—to their local church—but who is listening? Who is hearing? Who is that brother or sister who is true to Him?
How many times has an angel in the house of God been a sister with such clarity and such a heart for the Lord?
Many years ago, at the Richmond Conference, I got connected with Brother Kaung and Brother Lance. I had to go every year to that conference. Every year was like the Fourth of July—lights going off. I learned things I had never heard in a million years.
I had been to a good seminary. I studied books of the Bible in the original Greek and Hebrew. I had renowned Baptist scholars as teachers. But I had never heard anybody like these brothers—never.
Seeing Christ in the Scriptures—you could not get that in the best seminary in the world, unless they were stealing His books.
I could not have missed those conferences for anything in the world. My children were growing up, and I was going to the conference. There was a woman whom most of you do not know, Marilyn DeVries.
She was a woman from Raleigh. She loved the Lord. She saw things.
All I can tell you is this: my three boys went through her class. I think she taught seventh and eighth grade. They never forgot a word she said. She wrote on people’s hearts. Now there is an angel.
She wrote on my children’s hearts. Even though they strayed far from God, something was written on their hearts by that dear sister. She saw clearly.
She could share Scripture with children in such a way that it was written in them. They will never forget it. I could ask my son, who is fifty-two years old now, what Marilyn DeVries said, and I bet he could repeat it.
There is an angel. We need angels—angels in Sunday school, angels preaching from the pulpit, angels praying in the prayer meeting. We need angels.
Isn’t it wonderful when you attend one of our corporate prayer meetings, which can be so dry, and someone full of the Holy Spirit prays a visionary prayer that lifts us all up to heaven? Oh, I love those sisters and brothers.
They make our prayer meeting because they see what they are praying about. They have the end in view. That is not merely praying for Aunt Tilly’s broken arm.
Everything they see, they see in the larger context. Even when teaching a fourth-grade Sunday-school class, they bring in Christ on a bigger scale than the usual little pictures of Christ pinned up there. Everybody may go away knowing Bible lessons but not knowing the Christ behind the Bible as it is.
We need these kinds of angels. They need to be able to overcome a lukewarm church. They need to be able to witness to the lost.
They are in every church, I am sure—dear folks who give sacrificially. Many people are stingy, but these folks give sacrificially. It is wonderful to have that kind of vision. It can actually change a whole church.
In the early days, back in the 1970s when I started going to the Richmond Conference, Lance and Brother Stephen let me speak with them. I asked them a million questions.
There was a church at that time in a prominent city in North Carolina—not Raleigh, where we were. This church had become a charismatic Baptist church. Then they began to hear Lance, and they took the name Baptist off the front. Now it was simply the name of the city church.
I said, “Well, isn’t that wonderful? They are becoming like the church according to God’s purpose.”
A brother said, “They may be filled with the Spirit. They may be seeing some things. But they have to go through.”
I had no idea what that meant. “They have to go through?”
The whole congregation—from the pastor down—had to go through the cross and drop all that churchy stuff, then come back as brothers and sisters united together in the body of Christ.
Could they make it through? They did not make it through.
Brothers and sisters, in these last days, we need these angels. If we do not have heavenly vision, if we do not see God’s purpose, if this thing is not before us, how will we know what to do in these last days? How can we follow the Lord to the end?
There are many, many who love the Lord but have no vision. Yet they would follow if they heard.
Like myself, I was a sucker for our brother’s ministry. Every month I would go listen to him, and he was killing me softly with his song, as the old song goes. He was killing me. Every week he was killing me.
I never saw—I never understood—how he got Christ out of Judges. But he was preaching what became Seeing Christ in the Bible there in Raleigh. He found Christ on every page. I could not find Christ in the Gospels sometimes.
But he was seeing something larger than that. Do you know what I am saying? There was something that made all his messages one message. Start anywhere, and it came down to that. It was the same with Lance. Start anywhere, and it came down to that.
Heavenly vision: to see it is to see what God is up to in these days.
It is interesting how Paul says, “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.” I have thought a lot about that. Think about the humility of what he is saying.
Here he is, perhaps thirty years—at least twenty-five years—after he had been saved, and that is what he told King Agrippa. He did not say, “I have been faithful to the heavenly vision,” because that would have been a proud boast.
He did not say, “I did everything right by the heavenly vision,” because he could not claim that. Paul knew more than anyone that he was the chief of sinners, and he made mistakes.
All he could say was that somehow, through all his ups and downs, discouragements, mistakes, and precipitous actions before the Lord wanted those actions, the heavenly vision continued to pilot his way.
“I was not disobedient to it. Sometimes I strayed, but I came back to it. The Lord’s mercy drew me back and said, ‘No, no, no, brother, that is not the way to walk. Walk this way.’”
There was a controlling vision which, in the end, said yes or no to everything he wanted to do. It was no longer up to him. He was a man under the restraint of heaven.
Heaven was causing him to become a master builder of the house of God. When Paul built, he built with gold, silver, and precious stones. He did not build with wood, hay, and stubble.
I was a pastor building with wood, hay, and stubble because I did not know the gold of the lampstand. I did not know Jesus really meant it when He said, “I want the church pure gold. I want gold all the way through the church. I do not want compromise.”
There is not a church that is not compromised. That is why He is always recovering things. But He is looking for some in that church who say, “We do not want to compromise. Lord, help us. We have so much to undo and so much to learn.”
Paul was held by that heavenly vision.
That is really all I want to say, except for one more thing by way of explanation. If we speak about heavenly vision in an abstract way, you might get the feeling that only Paul, Isaiah, and John could ever see a heavenly vision.
But the fact is that heavenly vision is actually in us from the moment we are born again.
God’s plan is this: we come into the church, we are saved, and we see Jesus there in our spirit. We may not understand much of it, but we see Him.
Then we come into the house of God and begin to see Jesus more fully—in brothers, sisters, ministry, and worship. Just like Apollos, we go from that beginning sight into a fuller seeing.
When you see Jesus in you, then everything that comes out of that vision rings true. “Oh, that is right. Of course that is the way the Lord would build His body. Of course that is the way the Lord would minister.”
In the body of Christ, we should see the Lord. When we see the Lord, our vision expands.
Very few people can say, “I had a road-to-Damascus lightning from heaven. I fell off my horse, saw the whole thing go down the drain, and then saw the whole thing picked back up in a great, grand heavenly vision.”
But many saints, by the grace of God, have the Holy Spirit reveal more and more and more until they get it—the comprehensive, overall thing. Then they say, “Ah.”
I am so glad that when I saw this, I saw something I could not have explained to you at the time. I just knew I was through, so I quit my ministry.
But in the mercy of God, I went to the next Richmond Conference. Why did I go? The preaching was great—Lance and Stephen, one-two punch—but that was not why I went.
I went because I could see God’s purpose sitting over those people. I could see God’s purpose in these crazy fellows like Kenny, Jerry, Mac, and the young brothers. They saw something. They were being drawn by something.
There were dear old sisters. I remember one of the first conferences I attended. Between lunch and the ministry, there was an old sister named Llewellyn.
She told me more about Jesus Christ in a ten-minute conversation than I had heard anybody tell me in a year. She had seen Him. She had been amazed by Him. She saw how He was working things out.
She was probably a typical Southern mom. I do not know whether she worked at a job or anything, but man, she was smart—heavenly smart. It was amazing to see.
Then, by the grace of God—and I cannot get into the whole story because it is too amazing—somehow I got over to Halford House where Lance was. We held gospel meetings there with my father-in-law, my wife, and a team of fifteen or twenty brothers and sisters.
We had a wonderful time, people got saved, and we were so blessed. But at the final Sunday meeting at Halford, I stood up with my guitar. Back in those days, I always had my guitar. I did not just talk; I had my guitar.
They wanted me to sing songs, and as I was getting ready to sing, I looked out at the people. They had a worship service that absolutely blew me away. I had never heard people sing like you sang tonight—honestly. Baptists do not sing that way, not many of them.
I was deeply touched. They had a Scripture, then a prayer, then a song, and it all fit together in the tapestry our brother Daniel was talking about.
I looked over the congregation and said, “You know something? I found home. This is what I want.”
That is when I went home, and it was all over. I left that ministry. I was a pastor, everybody misunderstood, and I had to change everything around.
For a couple of years, I did not minister very much because I had to learn the Lord’s way of doing things. It is a lot different from the ministerial complex and the things I had learned. I am telling you, it is a lot different.
You may say, “Oh, it is impractical.” No, it is not.
It is listening to the Lord and even being willing, when someone says, “Okay, brother, do you have something to share?” to say, “No, I have nothing.”
I had never done that before. I always had something to share, even if I had nothing to share.
But now, to be a brother in the body of Christ—just one of them—and say, “Lord, give me something,” was different.
We had brothers in Raleigh. There was one crazy scientist. He was not even linguistically gifted; he was challenged in expressing things. But it did not make any difference. He saw things.
When things started going a little off in our fellowship life in Raleigh, he would say, “Ah, ah, ah, something is wrong.” You would ask, “What is wrong?” He would say, “I cannot tell you, but something is not right.”
Sure enough, we were getting out of the Lord’s way.
There was another fellow there, a florist. But he knew the way of the Lord, and the church was kept in the living way. He knew when things were getting off because he saw something.
This is the heavenly vision I am talking about. Once you see it, you never forget it. Once you see it, it aligns your life, or begins to align your life.
That is what I am praying for all of us here tonight. I was so glad that I got to go to Halford and to the Richmond Conference and see these things in action. It made such a difference to me.
In seeing Christ, of course, we have seen the heavenly vision. The church is in there, the kingdom is in there, the house of God is in there, the bride is in there, and God’s eternal purpose is in there.
Paul saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. I wonder how long that heavenly vision took. What do you think? Under five minutes, I would say. However long it took, it was under five minutes to have that dialogue with Jesus and see the absolute glory of his new Lord.
Yet Paul went back home, and then he said, “Christ revealed Himself in me, that I might preach Him.” Even with what he had seen there, it had to be seen here.
The heavenly vision the Lord wants us to have as angels is something we see here and see here.
We need angels. We need those who see the Lord holding the lampstand in His hand.
That was another thing I saw. It was not me. It was not my church. It was not me holding the lampstand. It was the Lord holding the lampstand. “Get your fingers off there, Dana.”
I felt that the Lord decapitated me from being a false head in the church. “Get your hands off the lampstand.”
Brothers, if you are in a church and you have your hands on the lampstand, you have a fight with the Lord. It is not consistent with His purpose. He is jealous for that gold. He wants it all gold.
But He is looking for angels. Not all overcomers are angels, but overcomers are those who, when they hear God speaking through angels who have seen, repent.
They hear what the Spirit is saying to the church. That is what makes overcomers.
There is no church where, if the angels speak and we sense something is wrong, we cannot repent and get things right. But it takes angels to understand what is wrong.
Otherwise, we say, “Ah, something is wrong. I do not know. Nobody knows what is wrong. I do not know.” We always say something is wrong. Well, we need angels—people who see.
Dear brother, dear sister, have you ever been confronted by a heavenly vision that reshaped your life?
It does not have to be a road-to-Damascus experience. But if it lays hold of you in a true and living way, it becomes a deciding factor in all that you do.
That vision holds you, and that vision keeps you. As Paul said, after all those years, something in that vision kept him going this way.
Look at the price he paid. It made no difference. He saw what he was after.
Do you see what you are after? That is what Paul says in Philippians, right? “I see what I am after.” Do you see what you are after? Or is it just earthly stuff?
The Lord is looking for angels—people who can minister out of heavenly vision. Let us pray that this might be our portion in these days.
O Lord, we are so thankful that in those seven churches, and indeed, we believe in all the churches of God, there are those who see—those to whom You have given a wonderful vision of Yourself, Your final purposes, and what You are doing.
I pray, Lord, that out of this group of young and promising servants, You will bring them into such a heavenly vision that it will conform them to Your will without compromise, as best we know how to walk.
We know there is not a perfect church in our midst. Oh, but Lord, we want those who have seen the city in heaven. They know who the Builder and Architect is.
O Lord Jesus, lay hold of us with heavenly vision afresh and anew. Let us not talk about heavenly vision or eternal purpose out of some sense of doctrine, but out of a sense of reality—having seen, having been there.
O Lord, take Your consecrated servants, Your bondservants. Even as You showed Your bondservant that revelation in Revelation 1, Lord, for these last days, we need Your revelation again.
Raise up angels, we pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.