How many of you have heard about that church in Canada just recently?  Don’t you think for a minute that the hour is not upon us when these people will roll in on this property and set up a perimeter and a chain-link fence and lock this property from us being able to enter.  It’s right around the corner.  They hate Jesus.  I mean, can it get any clearer than it was in Nevada?  The casinos and the strip joints are open, and the churches are closed and forbidden to come together.  This is the hour that we’re living in.  There were a number of people who were just on property.  And I’ve had some reports coming back, a couple of people I spoke to myself.  And they said, “How have you all been doing through this COVID thing?  How many people are you allowed to have in the church right now?”  And I just shared with them, “We’ve never shut down.”  This one fella I was talking to, said, “What?”  I said, “We’ve never shut down.”  I said, “The first couple of weeks, while we were discerning what this thing really was, we were trying to be considerate of other people in the neighborhoods and different things.  But other than just waiting until we were comfortable with what this was and how we were going to handle it,” I said, “we came together as a fellowship totally based upon Scripture that we’re not to forsake ‘the assembling of ourselves together’” (Hebrews 10:25).  And we don’t see a COVID clause.  That’s the fear of the world.  We have not received “the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).  We don’t fear what the world fears.  What’s the worst thing it can do?  Kill you and you get to go home.  Hallelujah!  What they fear, we don’t fear because the sting of death is sin.  And sin doesn’t have power over us any longer.  And to me it’s an insult on the Lordship of Jesus and a tragic display of the church and the churches authority and power for what so many churches have done and so many Christians have done in cowering in fear and looking more at the temporal than at the eternal. 

Father’s been gracious to us and we’ve been able to come together and commune and enjoy the presence of the Holy Spirit and the edification from one another.  Why?  Because we listened to the voice of the Holy Spirit and not the voice of men.  We don’t fear men’s faces.  This is how we respond to persecution.  The system really finds its strange, especially the church being ready to stand up and say, “No, we have no fear of your threats.  God is for us, and nobody can be against us!”  Hallelujah!  Oh, that doesn’t mean we’re not going lose a few in the skirmish.  But this power that we talked about of the Holy Spirit last week, this power to be witnesses is not just out sharing the gospel.  It’s the power to stand under threats, under all of the intimidation of the world’s system against us.  And we remind ourselves–let’s remember this–the church of Jesus Christ, the people that are full of the Holy Ghost are the ones that are restraining the Antichrist.  The more power we’re able to draw upon from the indwelling Holy Spirit, the greater we’re fulfilling our role as restrainer.  The more opportunity there is to preach a powerful gospel.  As we look to love one another and truly become servant of all, we give access to the Holy Ghost to work through us in a power that we’ve never known before.