Keion Henderson - From Chaos to Clarity

God says to tell the people He’s about to take you from chaos to clarity. Before you sit down, high-five all of the people who have been talking to you all service. If they haven 't talked to you, don’t say anything to them now, but high-five and tell them God is about to bring clarity to your situation. You may be seated in the presence of the Lord. Most everything you will ever know comes from one of two places: it either comes from the education you have or the culture you grew up in. That 's what you’re going to learn. It 's like you’ve heard that statement that says there is bought sense, then there is taught sense. There are some people — do you have any friends like this? They are educated, but they don 't have any street sense. They don’t know where to go, when trouble is about to start, or when to run; they don’t know anything. Just because you have taught sense doesn’t mean you have bought sense. We learn either from our culture or from our education.

Now, what I know-and I get this because I was just preaching in London, and the pastor and his wife were talking to us about the kingdom — I started to think this: this is what the church is missing. We’re missing the concept of the kingdom. Well, we live in America; we don’t live in London, so there is no Buckingham Palace. We live by legislative and judicial branches. We don’t have kings and queens in our society, so the concept of the kingdom has been lost in our minds because all prototypes have either been dissolved or abolished. Then here comes Jesus telling the greatest story ever told about the kingdom, and we miss it entirely because we’re looking at religion and not the kingdom. We think the most important thing is, «Well, what denomination are you? What church do you go to? Do you speak in tongues or not? Can you wear makeup in your church or not? Does your skirt have to be long or not?» How many of y’all remember growing up in a church where women had to wear skirts? They used some scripture to say this is why, because the Bible says a woman should not wear that which pertains to a man. But the problem is, what Jesus wore looked more like a dress than anything. So then that scripture is used out of context, which is what we call religion. Religion has caused more problems than it has solved. When those guys flew those planes into the Twin Towers, they did it in the name of God. Wars have been started as a result of religion, but there is something different for us who are the blessed of God, the apple of His eye, the creation of God. We live in a different paradigm. We don’t live in church; we don’t live in religion. Everybody say we live in the kingdom. But we struggle with the concept because we have no prototypes, no examples. We live in a world where the greatest story that has ever been told cannot be understood by those of us in Western culture because we don’t have a concept of the kingdom.

Now, what happens is at the close of chapter 4, we find the evidence of Jesus being the Son of God. Everybody say, «The Son of God.» How does He do that? He does it by a myriad of different things. Number one, people came to Him sick with all manner of diseases, and if you read the scripture, the Bible says He healed them all. If somebody came to Him and couldn’t see, He gave them sight. If they couldn’t hear, He gave them the ability to hear. If they came demon-possessed, He cast the demons out. Whatever their issue was, He came to them, and God dealt with it. He even turned water to wine-whatever the need was, He showed up and did something about it. So that was chapter 4; He was proving to us that He was the Son of God.

Now, once we get to chapter 5, we find fishermen who are at a lake. Listen to me: they are at a lake, and the Bible says that they have been out there all night fishing. Everybody say, «All night.» Come on! Say it with enthusiasm-say, «All night!» The reason why I want you to hear that is because they have been out there all night, and they have caught nothing. They started in the day; they put on their clothes, got the bait ready, prepared the hooks, and cleaned the boat. They did everything they could, and they went out there and fished all night, yet they found nothing. The Lord gave me a revelation: sometimes you can have a lot of effort and no evidence. In government, they keep telling you, «If you work harder, you’ll get more.» And it’s true: if you want to get more, you’ve got to work more hours. If you want to get more, you’ve got to work another job. If you want to get more, you’ve got to find some passive source of income; you’ve got to make some sort of investment. If you want more in government, you’ve got to do more. But that isn’t how it works in the kingdom.