He said I’ve got to bring these people out there. So he brings them out to that mountain. God says, all right, Moses, you tell them the whole reason I brought you out of Egypt was to bring you to myself. Go look it up in Exodus 19, it’s amazing. The whole reason I brought them out of Egypt was to bring them to myself. It’s in there. Read it. It’s amazing. So He says I’m so excited I’m going to come down there and introduce myself to them on the third day. So get them ready the next two days and the third day I’m going to come down, which is prophetic, and I’m not going to go into that.
So Moses gets them all ready, they wash their clothes, God comes down on the mountain and what do they do? They all run away, and they say Moses, we can’t handle God. You talk to God, tell us whatever he says, we’re going to hear and do it. And that’s amazing to me, right? And so Moses is heart-broken. And so his response to the people is Exodus 20:20, where He says, “Do not fear,” now look at me, do not fear because God’s come to test you. What’s the test? To see if His fear is in you so that you may not sin. Wait a minute. Do not fear, because God’s come to test you to see if His fear is in you so that you may not sin. He’s not contradicting himself, he’s differentiating between being scared of God and the fear of the Lord.
As I said earlier, the person who fears God— well the person who’s scared of God, I should say it this way, has something to hide. That’s why Adam hides from the presence of the Lord. Okay? But the person who fears God has nothing to hide. Okay? They’re scared to be away from God. So the first definition of the fear of the Lord is to be terrified of being away from Him. You know I’ll never forget, back in the 1990’s, it was 1994, Jim Bakker had read a book that I had written called “Victory in the Wilderness,” it was the first book I had ever written. He read it in prison. He had been in prison for 4 years. When he read it he contacted his assistant from prison and he said could you please find this author and ask him to come visit me in prison.
So I remember I agree to do it. And I walked into the prison and he comes out in his prison garb and grabs me and he holds me and he hugs me and he won’t let me go. Finally he grabs my shoulders and he said ‘did you write it or a ghost writer?” I said, ‘no sir, I wrote it. I’ve gone through a wilderness but not near what you’ve gone through.” He said “We have so much to talk about. Sit down.” And I remember he looked at me and he said this prison was not God’s judgment on my life, it was his mercy on my life. He said because John, honestly, if I would have kept living the way I was living I would have ended up in hell forever. When he said that to me I thought, okay, you have my attention, complete, total attention. So after about 20 minutes I felt very, very comfortable with him and I thought I’m going to ask him some questions. My first question was “Jim, when did you fall out of love with Jesus?” At what point did you stop loving Jesus?
