— Brother Phil Enlow: The home is the microcosm, if you will, of the Kingdom of God. Is it not? And of the church. And God’s order there, is so critical to everything. You know, it’s wonderful to come here and hear from the Lord, and have a general kind of, okay, we’re okay with each other, we get along, we’re glad to see each other.
But the workings of the Kingdom of God come right down to the home. God has invested different members of that household with different authority, and the ability to contribute the life of God into the life of the home. As I say, it’s not her place to be his head. But think of the power she has to help him be all that God wants him to be. Praise God!
Now, let’s bring this into balance. We’ve talked about this many times. If you leave it there, you almost get the impression that guys, we’re in charge! We get to do as we please! We’re the boss! Nobody can tell us what to do! We can seek what pleases us! Do you think that’s what’s involved here?
No, not at all. That’s not God’s design. “Husbands, love your wives…” (NIV). And boy, that goes beyond just some sort of sentimental feeling. This is not just romance here. This is a self-sacrificial giving of one’s self for the welfare of another. Okay?
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church…” So, what did that look like? “…And gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the…” Ah! We’ve got the word coming back into this, don’t we?
How does He work in us? He invests His words into our hearts and they begin to change us because we embrace them and they change the way we think and the way we look. You know, we present ourselves as a living sacrifice, and we allow ourselves to be changed by the renewing of our minds. That all comes into this. Do you see God’s handiwork and how He’s designed things?
Husbands, He’s given us a tremendous responsibility. I wish I could say I have lived up to it…not even close. God has given us an authority in the household. The question is, what do we do with it? How do we use it?
How did Christ use the authority the Father gave Him with respect to us? Aren’t you glad He did it for us? Aren’t you glad He was willing to sacrifice everything for our welfare? That’s what love is meant to look like. I need God. I have no power to do that.
But do you see the power that a husband’s tongue has? Does he use it to criticize and belittle? Does he use it to press down and try to get his way? Is it selfish? Do you see the damage that kind of a thing can do? I’ll tell you what, we need the Lord, don’t we?
( congregational amens ).
We need the Lord to be able to live up to any of this. But there is an order. There is a place God has designed for husbands, for wives, and of course, it breaks down into kids. We’ll get into that in a minute.
But He has set…He’s working to cleanse us, “…by the washing with water through the word, and to present…” Now there’s a purpose. There’s a design in the end. “…To present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” That’s the work that’s ongoing right now. That’s what God is doing in our lives, taking us toward that goal.
And it’s gonna come to pass, isn’t it? Because of His mercy and His love! And you know, He doesn’t look at us in all of our imperfections, like we look at one another. And all of a sudden, our tongue comes out in a pretty negative, pretty harsh way. I’m so glad that God is…He knows how to speak the truth. But He speaks it in love.
We never…if we’re really listening to Him, we never come to the place where we feel rejected, we feel, just set at naught, I don’t care about you. Always, there’s this wanting to help, wanting to lift us up, wanting to deliver us, wanting us to experience more of His love and His mercy. I’m so glad for the character of His voice. What an awesome voice to hear.
How terrible it would be if He were like us. And how impatient we are with each other, and with ourselves sometimes. But we need to see past all of that and understand the power of God’s Word. God invests us with the authority to speak words. Those words have power. If you’re a member of the Body of Christ, you have a measure of authority.
Now, I’ll say this, for some of you may be aware of this, there are people out there who have taken this off into never-never land, this principle. Oh my God! We’re meant to be in charge here. God has given us authority to rule over creation.
I have met people who ran in circles where they believe that they were part of a prophetic community. Oh my God! We don’t deal with the petty little things, we’re up here above the nations. We’re commanding things to happen and things not to happen. And, oh what God…we just, this is where…the place we’re supposed to operate.
Folks, that’s fantasy land. How many of you, some of you may remember something that Brother Jim Cymbala said in a message one time, he was talking about this. And he talked about, I suppose some prophetic group, I don’t know what, exactly, the details were. But he supposedly…they supposedly convened some kind of a conference in San Francisco. And, the purpose of the conference was to take authority over the devil and drive him out of San Francisco…something along that line.
Good luck with that! You know, there are things God hasn’t given us authority to do? We have authority to do what He says here! But I don’t have authority to go out and start commanding the nations! But God has given you, and me, the authority and the power to do what He has called us to do!
( congregational response ).
If He does call somebody here to be an apostle, He will give you what it takes. But if He doesn’t, don’t try to do it on your own. And that…for every aspect of divine order in the Body of Christ, God will give you power.
But I’ll tell you, one of the key ways that that power is expressed is through the tongue, and through words. God has given us the same power that Jesus had when He created the world. You and I have the power to speak life…to speak in such a way that it’s God’s spirit that’s going and affecting people around us. If we’re gonna touch people in this generation, we’re gonna need God to do it through us. We don’t have any power to do that. Okay?
So, he goes on and says, “In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” You get this right, man, you’ve got an awesome place where Christ rules.
( congregational amens ).
The potential of life coming from this order of things is just beyond what we…beyond the norm. But now he gets down to, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Children, God hasn’t put you in a place to tell your parents what to do, and to straighten them out, even when they’re imperfect. God is more concerned with your heart wanting to have a submissive spirit than He is about the issue you’re so worried about.
Hey, we’ve all been there. All of us old folks, we were young once, too. We felt the same way, that sometimes you do. And how…and what about the relationships among all of us, but especially young people. I think every one of you know, words have consequences. You have the power to tear down, to set at naught, to marginalize, to shove aside, to hurt, deeply, with your tongue.
Or you have the ability to encourage. Isn’t that what the Word teaches us to do? We need to use our tongues to encourage one another, and to build one another up. Yes, we can speak the truth, but it’s in love.
How do people speak, how do people feel around you and the way you use your tongue? When you’re feeling rough, do you just sort of let it all lash out? There’s a lot in this, isn’t there? But when you mix this principle of how we use our tongues with the realities of divine order and authority and how that’s carried out, it becomes a big deal. All right?
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother—which is the first commandment with a promise—so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”
But here’s one that’s pretty important. “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” This applies to mothers, as well. But fathers, if God has made you the mayor of your house, the head of it, yes, there is authority, there’s power, but the question is, what do we do with it? How do we use it?
What happens for example, when a father…and some of you have been on the receiving end of this probably, when a father says to a child something like, you’re a failure, you’ll never amount to anything. What’s the effect of something like that? That’s devastating! That comes straight from the heart of Lucifer! He may be venting his own feelings, but boy, there’s a…his tongue has become an instrument of satanic life.
What do you think happens when Dad does that in some fashion? Do you think that the kid just blows it off? You’ve got something that gets planted down here that becomes ‘truth’ to that child, far too easily. And you wind up with a kid growing up, and they’ll try, and they’ll try, and they’ll try, but the underlying ‘truth’ that controls how they think about themselves is that ‘I’m no good, I’ll never amount to anything.’ And it sabotages their entire life.
Do you see how the devil destroys lives with the tongue? Sometimes, it may be just a passing, a passing word. As though, well, words are just…that’s just a word. Words have power! And the devil will take things that we say, that we don’t even intend the way we…the way he thinks. We may not even consciously intend them to be something, and the Devil will take that and destroy somebody’s life with it, or cripple them.
You know, we recognize if a child were, for example, were to break a leg and it not heal properly, and they went around the rest of their life like this, we’d recognize the crippleness of it—it’s physical. But what about physiological crippling? What about spiritual crippling? I pray that if that’s something that’s come into your life that you will let God heal it.
( congregational amens ).
Because Satan has sown a lie in you. If you are His—if you are Christ’s, you are His child! You’re God’s child! You have an eternal destiny! Jesus paid the same price for you as He did for anybody!
( congregational amens ).
And you matter to Him!
( congregational amens ).
And I just pray God will take that truth from here, and so…and will just replace lies that have been buried in people’s hearts. But, oh God, the responsibility we have as parents to use the authority and the power that God has given us in a way that will build up.
I’m not talking about flattery and happy talk, on a carnal level. You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about speaking the words of God. If our hearts are open to what the Lord is saying to us, and the changes He is making in us, we’re gonna have something we can speak. We’re gonna be able to reflect that, it’s gonna come out in our own speech and the way we treat our children, and the way God treats us.
Oh, we need to have that same mercy. God has given you and everybody in a home a place and when it operates the way God intends, God’s spirit is there and peace reigns. But oh, when tongues get attached to human nature, you’ve got a fight, you’ve got a mess, you’ve got broken lives, you got all kinds of heartache and damage done to people.
May God give us grace to humble ourselves and say, oh God. Wouldn’t it be nice if we said with David, “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my Redeemer.” (KJV). It’s what we think about and what we say, what’s really gotten ahold of our hearts.
Didn’t Jesus say that it’s out of the heart, “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” Folks, if you’ve got those kinds of words coming out, and it’s kind of a characteristic of your life, there’s something down here that you need to get healed. If anger is boiling out of you, it’s because it’s in here. Don’t say, it’s their fault! We’ve said it many times, nobody can make you angry, being angry is a choice that we make. But it does become a habit. And we need God to break them.
( congregational amens ).
Just put this together in your mind and meditate on it. It’s a simple thought, in a way, but there is an order in God’s Kingdom. God has pulled us with raw, spiritual energy, power, that’s greater than everything the devil has. And He has brought us out, and He has made us a part of a kingdom.
I just thought of a scripture that we use all the time. Listen to the scripture we use all the time, in Revelation chapter 12. It talks about the victory of the Cross. Verse 10, “Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.” (NIV).
You see those words, power, kingdom, authority? We have all of heaven standing behind us, if we will hook up with Him, and be an expression of Him. God will be with us. And how does that come out? “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” Folks, this does get down to the individual standing against the devil. But you and I have been given a power against the devil because of what happened at the cross.
( congregational amens ).
The power and authority and the Kingdom of Christ has come! He’s called us into that! He has invested us with the ability, but the responsibility, to exercise the word that He gives to us in a way that builds people up, and sets people free! And the more we do that, the more we’re gonna have something that will help one another and build one another up, and have Godly homes!
But also, something to share with a broken world, because all they’ve got is power, the power of darkness, because lies…their entire lives have been built on lies. It could be that they were one of those that Dad said, you’re no good, and they’re living with that crushed spirit. Or they could have been one that said, you’re born for greatness, go for it! Either way it leads to death if it’s just this world.
But God has called us to something much higher. May His character and His spirit infuse our, what comes out of our tongues, greater and greater. I realize we are very imperfect at this, and we’ll still probably say silly things. I probably will today. But may God give us the power to recognize what’s going on, and the power to speak life.
You, if you are God’s child, you’re one of the only ones on this planet, who has the power to actually speak life. I’m not talking about just being positive with somebody, I’m talking about speaking divine life because we’re hooked up with the fountain, we’re hooked up with the source. That’s what this is about. May God give us grace to use the power that He has given to us in a way that accomplishes His will and His purpose in the earth. To Him be glory!
