Andrew Wommack - Effortless Change - Episode 15

Today's the end of my third week of teaching on a subject that I call effortless change, and I tell you, I'm just talking about how that the Word of God, if you will put it in your life, it's like a seed and it will begin to germinate, it will release power and it will just change you effortlessly... Automatically. The only effort is just to go to the effort of putting God's word in your heart and then you have to protect it, but the Word of God will just change you. It will cause you to grow and mature effortlessly. That is a great truth and I've been using this parable from Mark, chapter 4 and there's four different types of people's hearts represented by this parable, and the Word of God is like a seed and it's teaching the way that the word interacts with people's hearts.

If a person's heart is just totally closed and hardened, the word never penetrates in... Past their understanding and into their heart, well then Satan just steals these truths from them and it has no effect on them. The second type of person that it's talking about is what I've been talking about for the last day or two, and it's in Mark, chapter 4, verses 16 and 17, and this is where it talks about a person who gets excited over the Word of God, they see its potential, they're excited, but they don't go to the effort... Take the time to let it get rooted in their heart, and so because of that, it just isn't able to withstand the criticism and the opposition that comes against the word.

Boy, this is important, and I was sharing some instances about when the Lord first spoke this passage to me and my wife, we were in the baptist church. I'm not against the baptists. I got born again in the baptist, they did some good things, but they certainly weren't receptive to some of the things that God was showing me through the word, and when I began to start talking about grace and righteousness and the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and miracles and stuff like this, they asked me to leave and we got criticized a bunch because it wasn't following the baptist denominational lines, and because of this, it was making me waiver and I was receiving revelation from other people and I would preach it and see some good things happen, but when I got criticized over it, I would just lose it and the Lord spoke to me and told me it was because I was preaching somebody else's revelation, it wasn't my revelation. It wasn't rooted in me and that's the reason that it couldn't withstand the opposition.

And so Jamie and I made a decision. We prayed and we said, never again am I going to have to quote somebody else and say, this is what they said. It's going to be, this is what God told me. I may hear another person say it, but it's going to become my revelation. I'm going to meditate on it until it takes root on the inside of me, and so that was on a Saturday night. The very next day we went back to our baptist church. This lady who was like a spiritual mother to us, ver...Very influential in our life, she thought that I was getting off track because I was getting away from the baptist doctrine and she got really concerned and she took Jamie aside and pulled her into another room and told her that Andrew's about to go off the deep end. He is really losing it. You're the only one that can stop him, and she started trying to influence Jamie to stop me and Jamie and I had just made this decision and Jamie stood up and says, that's my husband and it's not just his revelation, it's my revelation. We agree on this.

This is what God is showing us, and she says, I reject this, and she walked out on that woman, and you know, when a... When a little tree is young like this, you put it in a green house. You have to put it in a protective environment because it can't withstand a winter or a storm or a flood because it just hasn't got the root. It's not grown and mature, and likewise, when you first receive a revelation from God, you aren't able to stand all of this criticism. You need to be in kind of a green house... In a hot house environment, and because of all of this, Jamie and I just walked out of that church... Walked out of these people's lives who had been so influential in us, and I'm not sure that we did it the best way possible. You know, now I'm a lot more mature, I'm a lot more secure, and I think I probably could have done things better, but at the time I just wasn't able...

I didn't have the ability to counter all of the opposition and the criticism and so God just told me to leave, and we walked out of that church, out of these people's lives who had been so influential on us, not because we didn't love them, but because we were just not going to let anybody take the word away from us. Anybody who's telling my wife that they need... That she needs to stop me and that she needs to keep me from going too far in this, that wasn't healthy for us, and we walked away from it. It's a long story, but the Lord did restore the relationship. I was able to minister to this couple, still friends with them today, and God's done some great things, but I'm saying, it was all based on this right here. This made a choice for me.