Andrew Wommack - Effortless Change - Part 14
Welcome to our Thursday’s broadcast of the gospel truth. Today I’m continuing to teach on effortless change. I’m now towards the end of my third week of teaching on this and I tell you, I’ve still got more to go. We’re teaching through this parable in Mark, chapter 4 about the sower sowing the seed. Let me just quickly again mention that I’m really trying to emphasize how important the Word of God is to your life and we’ve put together some materials to help you start planting the seed of God’s word in your life.
This is our Bible reading program that our students use in the first year of our Charis Bible College. They have to read through the Bible in one year in my class, that’s 20% of their grade. If they made 100 on every test, if they showed up every day, but if they didn’t read their Bible through in the year, the best they could make would be an 80, and so it’s 20% of their grade. I believe it’s really, really important, so this is a freebie. If you would call in, we would send that to you. Also, I’ve got this Bible program and I have written footnotes on over 18,000 verses in the Bible and I’m continuing to do this at a rate of 200 or more per month and that’s why we call it a living commentary and you can get this, and I tell you, this is invaluable.
This is one of the best things that I have to offer people because it puts you directly into the word explaining the exact scripture that you’re reading about, so that’s really good. And then we have this book on effortless change, a study guide, DVDs and CDs on it, and I tell you, these things could just transform your life, if you would get into the Word of God. So, on our program yesterday I was sharing from Mark, chapter 4, and in verses 14 down through verse 20, Jesus gives the interpretation of this parable that I call, the parable of the sower sowing the seed. There were four different types of people who received the word and only one out of four brought forth fruit, and then among those that brought forth fruit there was varying degrees, some 30, some 60, and some a hundred fold, and you know, I believe that you can make these comparisons from this parable.
Now, I may be taking some liberties with it. If I am, please forgive me, but in my estimation and my experience of dealing with people in 46 years of ministry, I see this to be true, and that is that there was only one out of four types of ground that this seed fell on that brought forth fruit, and I believe that there’s a parallel here, that out of all of the people who claim to be Christians and who say that they have made Jesus their Lord, there’s about 20% to 25% that really are productive and really flowing with the Lord and being led by God and seeing the Word of God work in their life, and then among those who were seeing that happen, there’s varying degrees of that, and I think that you can make that comparison from this parable.
You can also state that the vast majority of people, who the Word of God comes to, it doesn’t change their life. Three-fourths, 75% do not bring forth fruit to completion. That’s the way that it’s stated over in Luke’s account of this same parable. So, the very first person that it talked about was a person who didn’t understand the word. I got that from comparing this with Matthew, chapter 13, verse 19, this same parable is given in Matthew’s account and over there he said, these are they that understand not the word and satan comes immediately and steals away the word.
So, the very first thing in making your heart receptive to where the Word of God begins to start releasing its power is you’ve got to understand it. That is huge. I talked about that on our program yesterday. I could spend more time on it, but it is amazing how people do not understand the Word of God and it takes some effort. It really takes some effort. One of the things about this living commentary, some of these footnotes in here, it has taken me a week to write some of these footnotes and, and to put things together. Like for instance, when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, he conquered Jerusalem four different times, and you don’t get that if you just read through the scripture.
You have to study and then say, well now, wait a minute, it says here that Zedekiah was conquered by, you know, Nebuchadnezzar, and then in another place it’ll say it was Jeconiah, and in another place, and all, and you say, now, what is this? And you have to study and it takes effort to gain this understanding and put these scriptures together and get the full picture of what’s going on, and most people just won’t put the effort into it, and because of that, the Word of God, if you can’t understand it, it will not release its power in your life. It never gets below the surface. Your understanding is like the topsoil and it has to get below that and down into your heart before it begins to start releasing its power.
So, that was the first type of person. They didn’t understand and satan just has total access to a person who doesn’t understand something. You know, you can make a lot of comparisons of this. There was a time that I actually gave away, the very first car that I ever owned, it was my family car, it was a Chrysler Saratoga, 1957 Chrysler Saratoga, it had the fins on it. I called it my bat mobile, and anyway, it was a nice car, it was a hemi engine. It had a pushbutton transmission where you just push the buttons over on the left hand side, and anyway, I tried to work with that thing, but I didn’t understand cars very well and it just kept dying and I did what I knew to do and finally I gave that thing away, and it turned out that the person that I gave it to put a new battery in it and the thing worked.
It was just a, it was a bad battery and a bad battery cable and he replaced those and the thing worked, and you know what? When a person doesn’t understand, they’re at a loss of how to fix something, and there’s a lot of people that they are praying for healing but they don’t understand how healing works and so they can’t get a handle on it and they wind up just giving up on it. There’s people that pray for prosperity, but they don’t understand the laws that govern prosperity and they don’t know what the word says.
So, the Word of God has to release understanding to you. It has to, it has to be understood for it to begin to release its power and if you don’t understand it, satan will just come and steal it away from you. You’ll lose it. Just like I lost that car when there was really nothing wrong with the car, it was something wrong with me, great analogy there. In verse 16 the second type of person, it says, these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground: who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness: and have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word’s sake, immediately they are offended.
Now, this is really important, and like I told on the program yesterday, I believe that this is also a progressive Revelation, or it, it’s, these four different types of hearts are, your heart has to progress in receiving the Word of God. You don’t start where you are producing a hundred fold fruit, and so the very first step is, people, you know, they just don’t have a heart for the word, it never enters into their understanding and satan steals it from them. The second step is where people get more serious about the word, they see the potential of it, they’re excited about it. This says that they receive it with gladness, but they don’t have any root in themself and when afflictions and persecutions come, it just chokes the word. It, what does it do right here?
In verse 17, they have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word’s sake, they are offended. So, they get offended and that’s how they lose the word, and I believe that there is a progression. The first step is not understanding, then when you begin to understand and you get excited, you get, you want to start running with the word and just see it produce and you don’t realize that there is a time element of this and that the word has to take root in your heart and get down on the inside of you.
You know, when I first started ministering the word, I would minister to people and I would see some people get so excited. I have literally seen people before jump up, you know, sitting in a chair, bounce up and down. They are so excited they just can’t contain it. I’ve seen people shout and praise and all kinds of things, and you know, when I was first starting, I thought, boy, these people are really getting it, but then I’ve seen some of those people who got so demonstrative and so excited turn and walk away from it just as quickly as they came into it, and over the years I’ve con, kind of come to the place where, just like this is describing, that I recognize just a person who’s excited about the Word of God and maybe outwardly demonstrative about it, that does not mean that the Word of God is really working in their life.
As a matter of fact, sometimes people who are really emotional, they just go for the excitement of it, but they don’t want to, they are not the type of person that will just get into the day to day grind of taking the Word of God, putting it in your heart, living by it and letting this work out over time and they just can’t maintain it. The people who go the highest also fall the lowest, and over a period of time based on the Revelation of this passage of scripture, I’ve really gotten to where I enjoy people who are sitting there and you can tell that they’re thinking about it. They may not be outwardly that demonstrative, but boy, you can tell you’ve got their attention. They are listening. They’re processing this. They are letting these truths that I’m speaking take root down in their heart, and I actually have gotten to where I would rather see that.
Now, I’m not against outward displays. I’m aware that some people are just more emotional than others, but I’m saying that, I’ve gotten to where it’s not all about just what it looks like on the surface. You’ve got to get the word down deep into your heart and have root in yourself, and this is why a lot of people do not see the Word of God produce in them like they see it produce in other people is because they didn’t take the time to get it rooted in them. You know, when the Lord first showed this passage of scripture to me, I had just gotten married. Jamie and I had just really started taking a stand on the Word of God.
We had started sharing some of the truths in our church about righteousness, about grace, about God not judging us for our sins, not condoning sin, but loving us in spite of it, and on and on, and as I shared on these things, man, we started being persecuted, and of course, the immediate response is that you don’t want people to hate you and you don’t want to offend everybody, and so it makes, you tend to draw back and reevaluate and say, am I really correct in what I’m thinking, because look at these negative results, and so we were kind of wavering a little bit and I, during this period of time, I would go over to the will Roger’s auditorium in Fort Worth.
Every month Kenneth Copeland would hold meetings there and I would go over every month, and we did this, I don’t know for what period of time, seems like it was a year or more or something. We would drive like an hour and a half to get over there and we would go to these meetings and I would hear him minister, and man, I would get excited and I would come back excited about the Word of God. I would go back into my Baptist church and I would get to preaching on these things, and the first week, I mean, it was just powerful.
I would see people’s lives transformed, and then I would be called on the carpet and criticized over it, and then the next week, I might be good the next week, but I would be called on the carpet again and I would be criticized, and after two weeks, usually after two weeks, by the time the third week came, you know, I was saying some of the same things, but it was just like people would fall asleep during the class, they weren’t paying attention, it just wasn’t having the impact. The fourth week it was just as dead as a Hammer, and then I would go back over and hear Kenneth Copeland the next month. I would get all fired up and I would come back and I would go to preaching these things and it would be the exact same thing, and it happened so often that I just real, I expected it.
I said, well, this week, maybe next week will be good, but the third and the fourth week I know that it’ll get to where it just doesn’t seem to work and I’ll have to go back and get another dose of this and get fired up, and this, and I, this is where I was when the Lord revealed these scriptures to me. We were receiving a lot of persecution and criticism and Jamie and I, right after we got married, we were studying one night and we read this passage of scripture and I mean, it’s just like somebody turned the light bulb on and I saw that the reason that the word wasn’t working in my life was because I didn’t have root in myself.
I was going and receiving another man’s Revelation and I was preaching what I heard him say. It bore witness with my heart, I received from it, it blessed me, but I didn’t have root in myself. It wasn’t established in me and I would just go and parrot these things and it would work for a brief period of time until I got enough criticism over it that it would take my attention away from the Word of God and I would get to looking at everybody else and feeling sorry for myself, and when the Lord spoke this to me, I mean, it was a Revelation and Jamie and I held hands and we just agreed and we said, that’s it. I said, from now on I’m never going to have to say that somebody said this.
I’m never going to quote this person and I’m never going to preach another person’s Revelation. I may hear something from another person and receive Revelation, but I will meditate on it until it becomes mine, until God speaks to me. That’s why some of you have never heard me mention Kenneth Copeland and that I received from him in the beginning, and it’s not because I’m against anything, I’m not wanting to associate myself with certain people or something, it’s just that I now hear a person say something and the moment that I receive Revelation, and God bears witness, I’ll go pray about it, I’ll study it out, I’ll look up other scriptures to confirm it, and then by the time I get ready to minister it, it will be, thus saith the Lord. It’s not a person who told me, it was God who told me.
That is really significant, and when I teach our Bible college students here, and I teach a course on public speaking and how do you minister and stuff like this, this is one of the things that I tell them. I said, you, I don’t ever teach anything until I’ve probably meditated on it for a year or more. Everything I’m sharing, these truths that I’m sharing right here about the parable of the sower sowing the seed, the majority of these I got around 1973, and so it has been 40 years that I’ve been meditating on these things. These are things that I have lived, and because of that, it, it keeps me from going out and teaching something and then having to come back later and say, whoops, sorry about that. That wasn’t right.
Now, believe this. I only teach things that are really firm held convictions of mine, things that I’ve lived out, and it gets rid of the fluff and the things that were wrong and it just gets it down to the basics, and this is one of the things that the Lord spoke to me. He says, your root isn’t in yourself. You have to go get another man’s Revelation and you’re living off of his anointing and this is why you can only endure for a brief period of time and then when affliction and persecution, when criticism comes against you, you just fall by the way side and you aren’t seeing the word work consistently in your life because it’s not rooted in you, and I made a decision right then, and I said, you know what?
I am going to let the word take root in me. I am not going to have to preach somebody else’s Revelation. These are things that God has spoken to me, and so I’m saying to you right now that this is the way it needs to be with you. If you want to see the Word of God, the seed of God’s word release its true power in your life: you can’t just take what I’m saying.
Now, you can take what I’m saying to stir you up and to motivate you, but then you need to go to the word. If this parable of the sower sowing the seed is ministering to you, then you need to go back to the word and you need to study this on your own. Look it up in Matthew and in Mark and in Luke’s account. Read all of the different accounts. Study it, look up the Greek and the Hebrew words. Well, in the New Testament it’s just Greek words, and study this out and meditate on it until you can see examples of this in your life and let God take these truths that I’m saying and make them real to you and then you won’t have to go out and say, well, Andrew Wommack said, but you, you may have received some piece of information from me, but you meditate on it until God speaks it to you and you get this rooted in yourself.
You can’t live off of my Revelation. My Revelation may get you pointed in a direction, it may stir you up, it may give you a piece of information that you didn’t have, but you have to take these things and make it real for you. I tell you, what I’m saying right here is so important and most people do not study the Word of God this way. I, I just, I know that because I deal with so many people, so many ministers just parrot other people. I’ve heard ministers who are friends of mine come out and preach a message that is nearly word for word what I heard somebody else preach, and it’s not the fact that they both were listening to the same Holy Spirit. They listened to one another, one another, and they preached this message within a week or so.
I’m not saying that you can’t preach a message that you heard somebody else preach, but I am saying it takes a while to get it rooted on the inside of you. It’s not going to happen in a day or two or a week. It takes time to get the Word of God rooted in our heart, and there are some people who are excited about the word, they are really excited to think that man, the Word of God could produce healing in me or healing through me to somebody, the Word of God can prosper people, it can cause people to have joy and peace, it could repair marriages, and you get excited about it, but unless you get the word rooted in your heart, which takes time, it will not be able to withstand the persecution.
And notice, here in the 17th verse it says that this affliction and persecution comes for the word’s sake. Any time you begin to start taking the Word of God off of the page and putting it in your heart and it starts germinating and begins to start releasing its power, you can guarantee that satan is going to come against the Word of God and try and stop you. You know, it’s similar to, if you take a little tiny plant, and if it’s only that big, you can just pull that thing up and it’s easy to overcome, but if you let that seed grow until it becomes a mighty oak tree, I guarantee you, it can withstand a hurricane.
It can withstand cold and all of these kind of things because it’s rooted and it’s got this root system, and satan knows that if you begin to start taking the Word of God and it really starts releasing its power in your life, that he had better get you in the beginning when you’re young and when you’re vulnerable because if he allows the word to grow, then you’re going to be so rooted that you just won’t be able to move, and so satan will come every single time a person begins to make a decision to put God’s word in your heart, satan will come and try and steal away that word through affliction and persecution.
That’s just how it happens. That’s just the way that it is, and somebody might be listening and think, well man, I don’t want to get into the word then because I don’t want the devil to attack me. Well, I’m not saying that you’re going to lose. I’m just saying that there will be a fight. If you will stand and take the Word of God, the fruit that it produces in your life is well worth the fight. I’m just saying that it won’t come without a fight. You will have to fight the public opinion, you will have people get offended at you and criticize you, but it is well worth the effort to take the Word of God and just keep it in your heart.
I’m not trying to scare anybody away, but I am telling you that there is affliction and persecution comes because the devil knows that if he waits until the word really releases its power, you’re going to be unstoppable so he tries to stop you. He’ll take everything he’s got planned against you for the next two or three years and he’ll throw it all at you at once trying to get you to back up, and if you’ll just stand and work through these things, you’ll find out that, I mean, he’s, he’s not got a limitless bag of tricks and after he’s done everything to you that he can do, you’ll find out you just go through that and you begin to start seeing the word work and prosperity come.
When I first started preaching on healing, I had been relatively healthy my whole life. I never did have any big problems, but when I started preaching on healing, I mean, I got sick. For two or three months I had a cold, I had the flu, I had this and that, and I mean, I, at one time, just honestly thought, well, if this is the way that it is, I think I’ll quit preaching on healing, but I realized that satan was coming against me with these sicknesses and things trying to get me to back up on this Revelation of healing, and because of it, I just refused and I said, you know, it’s the truth and I’m going to preach it and I’m going to fight through this thing.
It says over in Hebrews, I think it’s chapter 10, it says, once you were enlightened, you endured a great fight of afflictions, and it’s linking satan’s fight to being worse at the beginning because of this exact principle. He knows if you get rooted, he’ll never be able to get the word out of you, so he will throw everything he’s got at you at the very beginning and you just have to be prepared for it and fight through it, and praise God, it is well worth the effort.