Spoken Word no. 191
Understanding St. John 14:12
Brian Kocourek, Pastor
October 2nd, 2010
Because there is a need for it, tonight I would like
to speak on
John
14:12 Verily,
verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he
do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
This Scripture is one that is not very well understood
in this Message. Many want to claim that for the Bride and then there are those
who claim it alone for the Prophet Messenger William Branham.
Tonight I would like to examine this Scripture in the
Light of the Word of God and Message so we can see what the real truth is
behind it.
Now, where much of the misunderstanding comes from is
those who take
Now, there is a vast difference between these two
Scriptures for
Now, when Brother Branham was quoting
Then brother Branham after quoting Hebrews 13:8 begins
to quote St. John 14:12 and he says, "The works that I do..." (That’s
If His Life is in you, it'll manifest Jesus
Christ. Now, that is true, and he even says Amen to
what he just said. But then he says, “Now, you all can't
be that one, but you can be a part of that with your faith. So
brother Branham is telling us that
Notice he then says, There was one
Moses, one Elijah, one Noah, on down, always been
that, but the rest of them could
accept it. And they (who
is the they he is speaking of here? One Moses, One Paul, One Jesus etc. They) would've had no
ministry unless there'd been somebody
believe it. Jesus would've
had no ministry 'less somebody believed it. Paul would've had no ministry 'less somebody believed it.
The Holy Ghost has got no
ministry by the Word today unless somebody's willing to get away from their
creed and come back to the Word again, no matter how well it's here and how
real it's here. It's here now. I know it's here. I feel it. I know it's here.
The Word says it's here. "Wherever two or three are gathered in My Name, I'm in the midst of them."
And I truly believe that He's
here, the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Now, then I want you to notice that there is one that
God is dealing with ere. It is not a universal Message but a One Man message.
But you have got to wake up to what that Message is.
Always remember, Deuteronomy 29:29 tells us, the secret things belong unto the Lord our God
but those things which have been revealed belong unto us and to our children
forever that we may do all the words of this law.
So the whole purpose of the Secret things being
revealed to us is that we may do all the Words of God’s Law.
Now, here is the key which I want to bring to our
understanding tonight. There is a difference between the Works that I do, and
the motive and objective in doing those works.
Now, right after brother Branham was telling us that
there could have only been one Jesus and One Moses and One Paul, he then tells
us that the objective for the works that these men did was to bring us to the
place of recognition of the hour in which we live.
He continues saying, Oh, if I could get this little tabernacle... I love you. And
I don't believe there's a man on earth that I could say I loved any better than
Jack Moore, and that's right, Young Brown, and Lyle, and these men here. I read
a article today that Anna Jean wrote; I was going to ask her permission to
reprint it again of the nice things that they can say. And, look, but if you don't wake up quickly, it's
going to be too late. The Life Tabernacle, I'm part of you, and that's the reason I cry out. Year by
year, I find it cooling. You might not notice it; you live right in it; but
stay on the field and then return back with the memories of the year before.
Didn't I tell you that out there in that little tent one night, "From this hour on"? What'd I
say about
And yet we find so many in this Message thinking that St. John 14:12
applies to them in the same way it applied to William Branham, and that is so
far from the truth.
And because they do not understand the application of
In this next quote I want you to see how brother Branham ties
So we are to be
looking at the Manifested word, not just an unfulfilled promise in this Bible. And
let me say this, show me one ministry that has fulfilled
And I want you to
notice further that the very purpose of God using that man to manifest that
Scripture is for a purpose.
Christ
revealed in His own Word 65-0822M P:113 So we see the evening Light's here. And what does it do to have light,
if you don't have any eyes to see how to get around in it. What is the evening
Light? The Light comes on to reveal
something. Is that right? If there's something here you feel, and you can't
understand what it is in the darkness, then turn a light on. It's to reveal. What's Malachi 4 to do? See? Do the same thing.
What was the opening of the Seven Seals to do? What are all these denominations
staggering around in this...?... It's to reveal, bring out. If you haven't got any eyes, then what's the use to reveal? There
has to be eyes first to see. Is that right? It'll reveal Malachi 4,
reveal St. Luke 17:30, St. John
14:12, also John 15:24; 16:13, and to also reveal Revelations 10:1-7,
the opening of the Seven Seals and the Seventh Angel's Message, to open up, to
reveal when the evening Light's come.
So we see the ministry
of Malachi 4 is to reveal
And so we see much contention concerning this because some want to have
what they were not ordained to have. So let me tell you what the whole thing is
about.
There is a pre-condition to Mal 4, there is a Pre condition to Revelation
10:1-7. There is a pre-condition to
So as much as you want to believe for
So when God has a Word
for the hour that speaks of who you are, then you must step into that Word for
that Word to become manifested. And I have shared quite a bit on that
concerning the Spirit of Adoption because after all, if we do not have the
spirit of an obedient son in us, then forget it all.
For years I have been a staunch defender of John 14:12
only being for br. Branham and that is true if you are looking at the works
ministry, because John 14:12 speaks of the works, ie: "the works that I do
shall he do also." Which no man’s ministry even
compared to Jesus Ministry until this hour in William
Branham, and even more so than what God did in the ministry of His
own dear son. However, our focus should not be the works, but the
obedience that is the pre-condition to the works being done. Obedience is
the pattern which has been established for us. Because let's face it, Jesus
never did the works nor did William Branham, it is God who does the works, and
they just stepped into the vision of what the Father showed them to do as
obedient sons.
Anyone can deflect the responsibility of being an
obedient son away from them and say that was for Jesus and that was for William
Branham only, and although that may be true concerning the greater works, but
that is not how God views it concerning our obedience to Him. We are ordained from
before the foundations of the world to become obedient sons and molded and
conformed to the Image of the first born son. That is Ephesians 1 and Romans 8
for sure. But we must gladly submit ourselves to our Father in all things that
H shows us to do. Not greater works, but the little things is what we seem to
leave undone. And it is the little things that you don’t do that will put you
out of the will of God.
Now, we know that in this flesh we will not be perfect
in doing all we are called to do, but in our heart we can be perfect before God.
And that is what God looks at. Jesus himself said, "Judge not according to the appearance but Judge
righteous judgment."
And Martin Luther said, "How shall
a work please God if it proceeds from an unwilling and resistant heart. To fulfill
the law however, is to do its works with pleasure and love, and to live a godly
an good life of one's own accord, without the compulsion of the law. This
pleasure and love is put into the heart by the Holy Ghost."
That is why Brother Branham said you could
have the right doctrine but if your heart is wrong, then what good will it do
you. God looks on the heart. That is why the Scripture tells us that the love
of God constrains us. That means it is our motivator, or as Jesus said, my meat
is to do the will of Him that sent me. In other words, “my
motivation”, “my
source of energy” “My
meat is to do the will of Him that sent me."
From Paragraph 96 of the Spoken Word is the original Seed brother
Branham said, I'm
a Branham because I was born of Charlie and Ella Branham. That makes me a
Branham because I'm their seed. Their two agreements with their sperm together
made a seed, and that made me. When God
and His Word becomes one (Hallelujah.) that's when God's Spirit waters the
Seed of God, the Word of God, It produces God; and it's not the individual; it's God. For
what? you are dead; you're not yourself
no more. You reckon yourself dead,
hollowed out, waiting for the Seed germ. Then what is it? It isn't you no more; isn't the man; it's
God in the man. It's a Seed germ like the beginning spoken Word. God's Word made manifest in the man;
then it isn't the man; it's the man that's died. He can't be a
hybrid and a son at the same time. He's either a son of death or a son of Life.
So if he's a son of death, give it over to the devil and let him kill it. Give
over to God a minute and let Him kill the devil that's in you, run him out:
hollows you out. Then let God plant His
Own Life in you, then it's not you no more; it's God's Life, because it's
God's Word, watered by the Holy Spirit will produce the same thing. You see it?
I'd just love to preach on that a few minutes, but with thirty or forty pages
of Scripture here... And I've only got three so far.
So preacher, what are you trying to say here. Well,
perhaps I am not doing such a very good job of it, but what it comes down to is
this. Too many are placing too much emphasis on the man. That is what brother
Branham is saying here. And God can not use the man, the body, the vessel
unless it has died to self. So When we focus too much on
You see, it is not him that runneth, nor him that
worketh, but it is God… So get your eyes off the vessel and onto the God using
the vessel. There are too may who are so focused on the Bride, the Bride, the
Bride and they are wrong, wrong, wrong. It is God, God, God, and He is the
Word, Word, Word. Therefore if the people had their focus correct there would
not even be a debate over
That is why if your focus is wrong you will take John
14:12 as the church universal when it is fulfilled in one man. He that believeth, not them that believe. And the same
ones who take this wrong will also misinterpret this next quote I am going to
give you.
Now in Christ is the Mystery of God Revealed
brother Branham speaks of the expression. How God was in Christ expressing
Himself to the world. And He is focusing on the way that God has expressed Himself
through many different vessels. He’s speaking of the God- life that was in
Christ, and the God-life that was in Moses, and he was speaking of how God
expressed Himself in Christ his Son, and in the Pillar of Fire, and how he
wants to express himself in his Children.
But many take the next paragraph in Christ is
the mystery 63-0728 P:87 and try to use it to produce a doctrine
that the fullness of God himself, the very person of God is now in His Church.
List to the quotation, and I will expand on this. Pp 87 I want to coast just a little
bit so that even people listening to the
tape will get the idea, that can see. It would take me around, and around
that clock, just each one of those subjects. But I hope I'm making it clear
enough that you can see what I'm coming to. See? God, expressed in Jesus Christ, Who was both Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, the Fullness of the Godhead bodily. Now,
the complete Fullness of the Godhead bodily dwells in His Church, the
preeminences. All that God was, He poured into Christ; all Christ was is
poured into the Church, the believer, not denomination. We'll get to that in a
few minutes, and it'll take it out of your mind forever. See? Show you what causes
that by the help of God, if He'll just permit it to us.
So in looking at this
quotation standing all by itself you might think that William Branham taught
that Elohim, God Almighty, the very person of God is now in the church, but
that is not what he is saying at all. Listen to the two previous paragraphs
that he was speaking and you will catch what he is saying now, because he even
paused to let what he had been saying sink in before he said the next thought. So
let’s read what he was saying before he brought out this whammer.
84
Moses: his intellectuals, he had to lose
them in order to find Christ, to be
a prisoner. Then when God got all
the world beat out of him and all the mighty man that he was, and stand in
the Presence of that Pillar of Fire that day, he was found just speechless. He
didn't even, he couldn't even talk, he said. God had a prisoner then. See? You
won't try after your own searching. Then God had to endue this man, endow him
with power enough that he could go down there. And he said, "Lord, I told
Pharaoh what You said, and he wouldn't do it." He said, "Then take
this, thy rod (God speaking; that's
God's Word); go out there and point it toward the east and call for
flies." And flies come into creation, because He had a prisoner that
Pharaoh couldn't pay off with nothing. Nobody else could turn him no way. He was a complete prisoner in the chains of
God's Word, bound up wholly to THUS SAITH THE LORD. Oh, if God can get His
prisoners like that.
85
Now, that's when He can express the preeminences.
You see? He's got the man or the person
so that he knows nothing but Christ. You get what I mean? All right. That's
secondly. First, to express Himself completely: God in Christ. Second, to
have the preeminences by this in His Church (which is His Body, Bride)
to... He could have the preeminence to
express Himself through them. All right. And thirdly, to restore the
Kingdom to its rightly position that fell by sin by the first Adam, back to
where He walked in the cool of the evening with
His people, talked with them, fellowshipped with them. And now sin and
death had separated them from His Presence and His entire expression. Do you
read it? Before the foundation of the world to express all of His attributes,
what He was...
So we see that the purpose of God is to use your body,
but first you have to die to self. Then God will use your body to speak His
Word, to do his work. It’s not you doing it, but God doing it. You are dead and
your life is hid with God in Christ.
That is why we hear him say in [264 God's Provided Place Worship No leaven among you, that brings the entire fullness of the godhead bodily
among you. Couldn't do it in Luther's age, couldn't do it in Wesley's age,
couldn't do it in the Pentecostal age; but in the day when the Son of man will
be manifested, revealed, brought
back the Church together with the entire Deity of God amongst His people,
showing the same visible signs, manifesting
Himself like He did at the beginning when He was manifested on earth in a form
of a Prophet-God. Ooh! Glory! Promised by Malachi 4, promised by the rest
of the Scriptures. Where you worship at?
The house of God, seated (in present tense). (265) Now, quickly, let us look just real fast now,
and we will go in about... in ten minutes we will be gone, the Lord willing. (266)Now
let us look at some that has been quickened into this house of God. Of their
age...(267) Enoch! (in ten minutes we will
go, if you can just suffer that much longer). Look, Enoch was the Living Word
of God of his age, he was a prophet. (268) A prophet is God's reflector.
How many knows that? The reflector
doesn't reflect itself, the
reflector isn't the reflection. There has to be something strike the
reflector to make it reflect. So a
prophet is a chosen vessel of God that cannot reflect nothing at all but he's
in direct line with that reflection, God, to reflect the image of Christ the
Word. See, nothing else can do it.
You are a reflector, that's the reason the prophet had to eat the book. That's
the reason he had to eat the scroll. He
had to reflect that Word for that age. You got it?
Brother Branham said, he said, "Even against my
better judgment, I wanted to be a trapper, but it's the will of My father that
I desire to do, I wasn't the one who appeared down on the river, I was only
standing there when He appeared. I am not the one who foretells these things as
perfect as they are, I'm only near when He does it, It's not me, I'm just a
voice that He uses, it's not what I know, it's what I've surrendered myself to.
You're not feeding on a man, a man, his words will fail, but you're feeding on
the unfailing body Word of the Son of
Now Webster tells us a reflector is simply a person or
thing that reflects. But that definition doesn't really help us to
understand what a reflector is all about, now does it? But it points us to the
fact that as Brother Branham said, a reflector does not give off it's own light, but reflects
the light of another. Brother Branham said, "the
reflector doesn't reflect itself, the--the
reflector isn't the reflection. There has to be something strike the reflector
to make it reflect. And
that is what Webster says, a reflector is simply a person or thing that
reflects. So then we must ask
ourselves, what is it about a reflector that causes it to reflect. We can see
that not everything can reflect. In fact, that is what the stealth bomber is
all about. It is made in such a way as to cause as little reflection as
possible. And so it's designers had to be able to understand all about the
reflective properties that causes a vessel to be able to reflect in order to be
able to make one that will not reflect. In their case the things that reflect
are radio waves, electronic signals and even light rays. And in order to make
the stealth invisible, it had to be able to redirect as many of these waves and
rays as possible. And so there are three basic areas that had to be designed to
do this.
So we are looking at a vessel that has gotten itself
out of the way to the place as brother Branham said you don’t have any thought
coming.
Brother Branham said in
his sermon, ONENESS 62-0211 102 What is it? You've
got to get with the Word, get yourself killed out. I'm persuaded that many of us, friends, have received the
Holy Ghost, but we just receive enough Holy Ghost in us to make us to a place
where we don't want to lie, we don't want to steal, we don't want to do
anything. But God wants to fill every fiber of His church; He wants to fill your thinking; He wants to fill your mind. He wants to fill every bit of
you, just make you completely, totally
dead to yourself or to your thinking, just so surrendered in God till His Word's just living right through you.
You don't know nothing else but God's Word; just stay right with His Word; It is Life. "My Words are Life," said
Jesus. He's placed with them, teachers believing the Bible, prophets that say
the truth, that say, show the same prophecy that they've always did down
through the age. What's He done? He's
showing Himself alive among them, confirming His Word. His Word, the
Spoken
Word Original Seed 87 All right. All right, we notice then. See,
the spoken Word... Then we are God's
Word made manifest. That's how God wants His church: is to manifest
Himself. How can He manifest Himself unless His Own Seed is in that person? How can you use your own thoughts and God
manifest Himself through you? How
can you take your own belief and say, "Well, my pastor teaches... My creed says that this... days of
miracles..." How you going to do
that and then be a manifested son of God? How you going to do it? The death
of Jesus wasn't nothing to you. "Oh, I accept Him as my Saviour." You
don't. You say you do, but you don't. Your works proves what you are.
Let us pray…