Sid: My guest is red hot for the Messiah; he’s Pastor Marc Lawson, Pastor of Northgate Church in Woodstock, Georgia. He had a series of dreams and visions which caused him to disassemble a very successful church and make it closer to what the Bible says as opposed to what tradition has evolved. You have managed to equip all of your people to do the same works that Jesus does and even greater and that after all is what Jesus said were entitled to. We don’t see it a whole lot, we hear about it in foreign countries, but tell me what’s going on in your church Pastor Marc.
Marc: Well we had these, like I said earlier I had a series of visitations and visions, and realized there’s got to be more. I’ve spent many years involved in the church, many years discipling doing a lot of church planting and getting ministries going, and being fruitful. But I thought there is something in the paradigm in the way we do it. We have great leaders, we have good people; the people want to do the will of God, and I just realized that the Body is called to do the ministry. Ephesians 4 tell us that the apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists, these are all there to equip the saints for the work as servants. Ephesians 2 says that, before the foundation of the world there are works set aside that God has for us to do. And yet for some reason if you ask many Christians, one man even said that 95% of most Christians if you asked them what they’re called to do they don’t know. And so we realized okay we can find out what everyone is supposed to do by equipping and releasing everybody into basic preaching ministry where we declare and bring the gospel. And that’s all, that’s outlined in Matthew 10, it’s very simple; we’ve made preaching to be this complex thing where only an expert can do it; they have to have a black Bible and they have to have a podium, they have to have an audience, they have to be in a stadium. And that is not, that is just not true, preaching is heralding, crying out with good news and we have good news. The good news is that Jesus is King and that His Kingdom is here right now. It say it in Matthew 10 it says in verse 7, it says “As you go, preach this message.” Jesus even tells us what we’re to preach, He makes it so simple that anybody can do it. “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those that have leprosy, drive out demons; freely you have received, freely give.” And that’s what He said we’re all called to do, we can all do. John 14 says “Greater things than I’ve done, that you’ve watched me do.” He told this to His disciples, “Even these things you can do and greater.” And so we realized we’ve got to get clear hear about our message; our message is too complicated, the message can’t be about our local church. It has to be about Jesus is King, and that His Kingdom’s here right now. Once we declare that intent we declare a statement of fact and then we do what He says and He says He’ll back us up. There is no cancer in the kingdom, in Heaven there is no cancer, in heaven there are no addictions, in heaven there are no people with bondages and addictions, and diabetes, and bone diseases and things like this. There are no broken bones in heaven; there is no wheelchair ramp in glory as you walk in. You know St. Peter isn’t wheeling you up into the wheelchair ramp; there is no wheelchair. That is what we see here and we have accommodated, churches have accommodated sickness, we’ve accommodated bondages, we’ve accommodated depression and this is what we think is normal. Many churches only have a healing meeting once a year and so what we’ve realized is that we need, the body needs to do this all the time wherever we are, or wherever we go. And so we’ve changed our whole church schedule to Tuesday, everyday but Monday’s is our day off. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we’re on to projects in different areas. Wednesday morning’s we have ladies going into nursing homes, we have people getting healed of Parkinson’s, we have people getting healed of Alzheimer’s! The Lord gave us a vision about ten years ago that we would see whole nursing homes emptied of emptied of Alzheimer’s patients. Can you imagine what that’s going to do; when this starts happening and we continue to do it Sid, I believe as the Body wakes up to this I believe we’re going to see, it’ll be like a progressive growing in glory affect, and I think we’ll see hospitals literally emptied out; we’ll see things like this happen.
Sid: You know I’m looking at page 190 of your book because you triggered something when you were talking about the gospel of the Kingdom as opposed to the American gospel.
Marc: Oh boy.
Sid: And you have a column here of what the American gospel says and what God says.
Marc: Right.
Sid: Let me read a few of these, the American gospels says “Many choices, many options; the gospel of the Kingdom says “One choice, obey the Spirit.” American gospel says, “God plus me. The gospel of Kingdom says “Follow me.” American gospel says, “Comfortable.” The gospel of Kingdom says, “Uncomfortable to our flesh.” The American gospel says “Get inoffensive.” The gospel of the Kingdom says “Offends the mind reveals the heart.” I mean each one of these is enough to cause someone to stop and ponder. You have so many wonderful things it seems as though the trend of the church is not towards doing the works of Jesus and proclaiming the Kingdom of God has come in demonstrating, but more of theater, one man does everything, spectator sport, seeker sensitive, and they’re growing like gang busters. What’s the difference?
Marc: Well, I mean that the Bible is so clear that that will happen, and there is a notes by great evangelists, I think that it was Finny, how to preach so that it doesn’t affect anybody. And we put that, we hand that to our first time guests and say this is the way that we’re not going to preach. And I think if you create a…one of the reasons I wrote this book is to awaken the church up to its slumbering state where we are comfortable, we are flesh centric, we are centered around people doing everything we just turn ourself off and go to church. See we got to stop going to church and start becoming the church. You will want to go to church a lot more if you become the church. Because our people, we can’t keep them away because they’re so excited because of the testimonies.
Sid: Tell me one testimony that will get us excited.
Marc: Well I mean I have several here, but here’s one and outreach teach from the church was in a trailer park in Woodstock; these are just blocks from our building. As we’re following up with a family there they pointed us; just to tell you the kind of stuff we do. We’ll walk into a neighborhood and we’ll try to find a person of peace in a village. We viewed and in the Bible they call them villages, we view these neighborhoods just like villages and they have their own hierarchy and we’ll go in and we’ll say, “Point us to a home where people really need help.” They pointed to this team and the team walked over and there’s a nice young family with a small child, but you could tell the child had mental health problems. And we’re preaching the good news of the Kingdom; the family identified several areas where they needed the Lord’s help.” The mother was bipolar and also had 80% hearing loss in her right ear, the father had asthma, and the daughter had a bad sinus infection. The team prayed right there on the spot, the father was breathing completely opened up from asthma immediately and all wheezing stopped immediately. They prayed for the mothers deafness and commanded the deafness to go and her ear to be opened, and she responded and she could heat and we did a number of full tests and she indicated when she left that she could hear perfectly. Now did we take her to a doctor to do a battery of tests? Most poor people can’t afford batteries of tests.
Sid: That’s okay someone can tell when their deaf and they can hear and you don’t need a doctor to tell you that.
Marc: And they are so grateful, now you say “How’s this help your local church?” We’ve changed the view the way we help the local church is we wake up our local church to go bring the kingdom to everywhere they are, and as they’re awaken our church will be healthier. Our church is healthier than it’s ever been because our body is functioning, they’re not jealous they’re not angry. The thing to get jealous of, is they watch people give testimonies on how God used another person that week and they’ll go “Wow, that was awesome I want to do that too.” So we’re provoking people to jealousy even with the testimonies. So we have a whole wall in our church, like I’ve mentioned before with wheelchair and devices, and we have hearing aids. We have one lady that had a hearing aid for 57 years she had an almost $3,000 custom hearing aid, God opened her ears and I mean that’s incredible, I mean that’s it’s incredible that she gave it to us that she didn’t need it anymore but it’s incredible that the Lord, why would he heal a 69 year old lady? I don’t know but God’s good and he likes to do this stuff all the time. So we’ve turned the church is inside out, we…
Sid: Do you equip anyone to do the same things that Jesus did in His days?
Marc: We take troubles young people; they say “My guys rebellious.” We get them to repent of that and get them straightened out, just get them so that they’re square. The reason you’re messed up is that you’re trying to find adventure with this other stuff. Let us show you real adventure and we can take just about anybody. And when I say just about anybody the only people we have a hard time with are people that they think they already know how to do all of this. And we just say “Well, how many people have you gotten healed this week, how many people have you led to the Lord this week, how many have gotten saved, born again, healed, delivered, raised from the dead this week?
