The Bible and Life

Friday, June 12, 2026

God Dwells In People Not In Buildings

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

GOD DWELLS IN PEOPLE NOT IN BUILDINGS.

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One example of believers trying to live under the provisions of the Old Covenant is believers calling the church building the “house of God.” Most church dedication services I’ve ever attended were centered around the idea that the building they were dedicating was the house of God. The ministers usually read about the dedication of Solomon’s Temple in the Old Testament; however, this leaves the impression that the church building is a house of God just as Solomon’s Temple was a house of God. But nothing could be further from the truth!

Under the New Covenant God dwells in people—not buildings.

If people aren’t careful, they will put too much significance on a place—on buildings and on other material things.

For example, I know of a beautiful church in one state, and chiseled across the front of the building at the top, is a scripture from the Old Testament about the church being a temple of God. I get provoked every time I drive by that church. I think, Dear God, they’ve got a lie right on the front of the church building, and people go there and think it’s a holy place. If we say any church building is the house of God in the sense that God dwells there, we’re wrong. In the New Testament, God does not dwell in any buildings made with human hands.

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On the other hand, if we mean that a church building is the house of God because it is dedicated to the Lord and used for worship, that’s all right. But you must be careful that you don’t get out of line with the Word of God in this area because it is so easy to become taken up with material things in the sense realm—the natural realm which you can see—and miss the spiritual reality.

I was holding a meeting in Texas in 1951. After the meeting was over, I went down to east Texas to preach. Aman came up to me and said, “I hear you just left such and such a place.”

And I answered, “Yes.”

He said, “What kind of church does the pastor have there?”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

He said, “How many does he run in Sunday school?” So I told him.

Then he said, “What kind of a revival did you have?”

I said, “Well, the old-timers said it was the best revival they’d ever had. (The church had been in existence for more than forty years.) They said it was the greatest revival in the history of the church.”

“How did your crowds run?” the man asked.

I said, “We filled the building up and had to borrow one hundred folding chairs from one of the local business places. We set the chairs down in the aisles and then we moved the altar bench out and used that space to seat people.”

He said, “You moved the altar out?”

“Yes,” I said, “we took the altar bench out.”

“Well,” the man said, “I thought you got people saved.”

I said, “Yes, there were about one hundred people who responded to the call for salvation.”

He said, “How in the world did you ever get anyone saved without an altar bench?”

“Well,” I said, “I never heard of an altar bench saving anyone yet! I thought Jesus was the One who saves, not the altar bench!”

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There is nothing holy about a piece of furniture. You can make an altar anywhere, isn’t that true? I know of people who got saved out in the cotton fields picking cotton. They got saved going down those rows of cotton dragging a cotton sack! They made an “altar” out there on their knees between those rows. I also know of folks who have been saved and who have received the Holy Ghost out behind a barn.

Certainly, people should be taught to be reverent to God while a service is going on or while the Spirit of God is manifesting Himself to minister to people. But if we are not careful, we can attach too much significance to natural places and things and miss the Person of Jesus, whom we are actually worshipping. And we can miss the reality of our own bodies being the temple of the Holy Spirit.

• Kenneth E Hagin || Bible Faith study Guide

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Friday, June 5, 2026

God Met Us Outside

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

GOD MET US OUTSIDE

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When John Wesley and his brother came over to the United States as missionaries to the Indians in Georgia, they weren’t successful in their attempt to convert the Indians. While traveling back to their home by boat, the Wesleys learned some deeper truths about God from a group of Moravians that was present on the boat.

When John Wesley returned to England, he was preaching some of these truths, and the church leaders put him out of the church right in the middle of his sermon. Wesley wanted to finish that sermon, so he stood on his father’s tombstone in the churchyard and preached. In England in those days, the dead were buried in the churchyards.

As Wesley stood on his father’s tombstone outside and preached, some of the people came outside and listened. Surprised, Wesley reportedly said, “To my astonishment,God met us out there. Up till then we didn’t know God would meet us anywhere except in that building. But God

met us out there in the open air.”

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Later, John Wesley and John Whitfield became the first, what we call, “field preachers.” They hadn’t known God would meet them anywhere else but inside the church building. They had attached great significance to the building. But they learned that one can sit and listen in reverence to a service outside in a tent or in an open-air crusade just as well as he can in a church building.

•Kenneth E Hagin

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Friday, May 29, 2026

A Greater Baptism

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

A GREATER BAPTISM

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When the disciples were put into prison, and their lives were threatened, on account of the great power with them, in healing and miracles, they were forbidden to preach in the name of Jesus; for they saw the power came through His name. They came together, and they knew it was the power of God that caused all their persecution.

They knew if they had a form of religion, and denied the power, that they would have no more trouble. But beloved, they said, “We will be true to God. We will preach the word if we die.”

Then they prayed to the Lord, saying, “Lord, behold their threatenings; and grant to Thy servants boldness to preach Thy word, by stretching forth Thy hand to heal, and grant that signs and wonders may be done in the name of Thy Holy Child Jesus.”

You see these ministers needed power to give them boldness to stand up for Jesus, to preach all the words of this life. When they preached they knew they must see the signs in the meeting of the Presence of the invisible Christ, who will be present to confirm the word and their message. Jesus said , “I will be with you all the way, even to the end the age.” Then like Peter, they would say to those present. “This that you see, hear and feel, it is the promise of the father, it is the Holy Ghost.”

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The Lord was pleased with their prayer, and with their faith and courage, and the place was shaken-the building where they were assembled-and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and spake the word with boldness.

Beloved, see, this was a greater baptism. They needed it to prepare them for the work they had to do. After this they had greater success. God did mighty signs and wonders at the hands of the apostles; great fear fell on all the church, and on all that heard, and saw these things. Multitudes of men and women came flocking to Christ, and were added to the the Lord

SIGNS AND WONDERS,

BY MARIA WOODWORTH ETTER

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Friday, May 22, 2026

The KJV Bible

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

THE KING JAMES VERSION BIBLE

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1. The facts of revival and soul winning. More souls have been saved and more missionary work accomplished through the preaching and the teaching of the King James Bible than any other "Bibles" combined.

2. The facts of material and physical prosperity. The histories of England, Germany, and the United States are the histories of material blessing as long as the Reformation text was honored; disaster followed where it was abandoned.

3. The fruits of those who reject the Authorized Text. There is not one Latin American or South American nation that ever became even a third-rate world power. There is no evidence that the man who promoted the Greek text for the new "Bibles" were soul winners, and the majority of them (Nestle, Aland, Metzger, West- cott, Hort, Lightfoot, Ellicott, et al.) have never left a record of any clear-cut conversion to Christ. Most of them believed in baptismal regeneration in an age that had seen 200 years of preaching from the Authorized Bible. The fruits of Rome are well-known by church historians and Rome has NEVER accepted the Greek text of the King James Bible as the correct text. Jerome's Latin Vulgate will match the Egyptian family of manuscripts in most of its important readings.

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If any reader desired to investigate these matters more thoroughly there are many excellent works available. However none of these books will be given any publicity by any of the major Christian universities or colleges for the simple reason that they will cause the student to put more faith in the King James Bible than the FACULTY MEMBER who corrects it! This, the schools cannot afford, so you will find that the following books have been "blackballed" by the major Christian schools that profess to be "fortresses of the faith" or "bastions" of Orthodoxy.

1. Believing Bible Study, by Dr. Edward Hills, Th.D.

2. Which Bible? by David Otis Fuller, D.D.

3. The Traditional Text, by Dean Burgon.

4. God Only Wrote One Book, by J. J. Ray.

5. The Christian's Handbook of Manuscript Evidence, by Peter S. Ruckman, Ph.D.

6. Any publication by the Trinitarian Bible Society of London, England.

As the modern "fundamentalist" institutions abandon the word of God (while still professing to believe in it), the child of God should arm himself with the information which follows and know "whereof" he speaks and "whom" he believes.

Dr Peter S. Ruckman

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Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Praying For Your Nation

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

PRAYING FOR YOUR NATION ; WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHRISTIANS' REFUSE TO PRÀY FOR THEIR NATIONS.

I exhort therefore, that, first of all,supplications, prayers, intercessions,and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.

— 1 Timothy 2:1-4

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After the final service of our Campmeeting ’79, some of the speakers and others went up to Kenneth Hagin Jr.’s hotel suite for sandwiches. As we were talking about the things of God, the Spirit of God kept moving on me. (Actually, only three times in my life has the Spirit moved on me in such a measure.).

I said to the others, “Let’s pray. The Spirit of God keeps moving on me.”

We prayed. By the Spirit, I ministered to each one present. Then I was caught up in the spirit of prayer. For lack of a better term, I was “lost in the spirit.” I was not unconscious — but I was more conscious of spiritual things.

Spiritual things were more real than the natural.

I sat with my eyes shut, praying in tongues, for what proved to be several hours. (It was just after midnight when we started praying. When it was all over and I opened my eyes, it was after 4 a.m. Yet it seemed as if it had been only 10 or 15 minutes.).

The Lord spoke to me. Among other things, He gave me instructions concerning the Prayer and Healing School we are now holding every weekday on the RHEMA Bible Training Center campus.

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And I saw something. I saw three things coming up out of the Atlantic Ocean. They looked like three giant black frogs as large as whales. One was in midair. The other two had just stuck their heads up out of the water from the east.

I had seen something similar nine years before.Jesus said to me, “You saw the same thing in 1970. I told you then exactly what they were, but you didn’t do what you should have done about it. I told you back in 1970 to pray for the leaders of the nation. What happened [Watergate and so forth] isn’t all the fault of the man who was than President.

I am going to hold the Christians of this nation responsible. You are the ones who allowed what happened to your nation. If you had prayed, it never would have happened. I showed you what was about to happen. Go back and check... .”

(Later, I went back and checked what the Lord had said to me in 1970 from tapes and manuscripts of a special meeting we held in October 1970.).

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Jesus said to me, “Back in 1970, you saw three similar dark objects come up out of the Atlantic and leapfrog all the way across the land. If you and the Christians had done what you should have done, none of those things would have happened to your nation. You would not have had the riots. You would not have had the political disturbances. Your President would not have made the mistakes he made. In fact, I am holding the Church responsible for his mistakes.”

I began to weep and cry, “Oh, God!”

“Yes,” He said, “I am holding you and the Church responsible.”

Then He said, “When you tell that to some of the Christians, they will laugh. But when they stand before my judgment seat and they receive the condemnation rather than the man who was then President, they won’t laugh.

“If Christians had done what I told them to do in the Bible — if they had prayed for the leaders of their nation — they would have kept the evil spirits from operating.”

Then He continued, “Similar things — not the same things — but similar things are about to happen again. If you do not pray, they will happen. I am not going to hold the President responsible for the nation; I am going to hold the Christians of the nation responsible.”

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Now let me explain something — you have to know how to interpret these things. I saw those three creatures come up out of the Atlantic Ocean. But that doesn’t mean they rise out of the ocean. From Genesis to Revelation, “seas” and “waters” refer to a multitude of people. Out of the multitude of people, these things will rise up. Sinners are dominated by the devil; they’re in his kingdom.Jesus said, “There will arise, unless the Christians pray — not for the same purpose that the other riots came — but there will be riots, tumults, and disturbances all across the nation.

“Second, something is about to happen to the President that should not happen — and will not happen if you will pray.

“Third, something is about to happen again that will bring further trouble in the economic scene, the financial structure.

“But you can stop all three. You can stop the upheaval in the social structure. You can stop the upheaval and the activity of the devil in the

political scene. You can stop the devil from disrupting the financial scene of your nation.

“You can change all three through intercessory prayer. That’s one of the main purposes for the classes you are going to start in the fall.”

- Kenneth E. Hagin

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Friday, May 15, 2026

Misuse Of The Gifts

Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!

MISUSE OF THE GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

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I never allow the gifts of the Holy Spirit to be misused in my meetings. I was preaching at a certain church, and the pastor's wife remarked to her husband, "Since Brother Hagin's been here, we haven't had a bit of trouble with Sister So-and-so and those others." I said, "Why, no, I haven't had any trouble with them." The pastor's wife said, "You notice they don't manifest whatever it is they claim to have in Brother Hagin's services. They stay quiet."

This pastor and his wife went on to explain that these women tore up some of their services with so-called "prophecies" and interpretations of messages in tongues. These "prophecies" were wrong. They were not in line with the Word of God. They were unedifying, and they led to bondage.

The pastors were marveling at the good behavior of these women in my services. "Why, they're quiet as mice," they exclaimed. I replied, "I wonder why? I didn't say anything to them, but if they had gotten out of line, I would have corrected them in love." The pastor's wife said, "Well, Brother Hagin, you take charge of the service. One thing about it—they know you're in charge, and they're a little fearful of you."

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When things are wrong in a meeting—when someone misuses the gifts—I don't think we should go along with it and just "swallow" it. If we do, people (and especially our young people) think we don't know the difference between the right and wrong operation of the gifts; between the real and the false.

We should teach people in love. If they won't accept correction—and if they persist in their error—we will have to rebuke them in love from the pulpit. I do that in my meetings. I endeavor to do it in love. You may have heard me call people down sometimes. I say, "Now you just wait a minute here..."

It doesn't mean that person is completely out of line; but it does mean that they're misusing the gifts and are out of line in some things. People whose hearts are right want to be taught. People who don't want to be taught are not right to begin with. If I got wrong, I'd want people to line me up. I'd take teaching. I'd line up. I'd admit I was wrong.

Sometimes we have a false pride about us. We don't want to admit it if we've made a mistake. But if you say you've never missed it in life, you'd be lying. So you might as well go ahead and admit that you've made mistakes.

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Let's take correction if we need correction. And let's realize that this anointing and this unction is on the inside of us, praise God. And He said that by this anointing or unction we know all things.

That's what the Bible said. It's either the truth or a lie.

Some people say, "I don't know." If you don't it's because you're not listening to the unction that's inside you, because the Spirit is in you to inform you, instruct you, and tell you things. And you can know immediately when something's out of line.

It's amazing to me how little children will know when things are wrong and grown ups don't know the difference. I remember one time when my son was about 9 years old and was with me in a service, for I was preaching close to where we lived. There were some things that went on with tongues and interpretation that were out of line, but I never said a word, because it didn't happen in my part of the service. It happened while the pastor had the service, so it wasn't my responsibility.

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Driving home that night, Ken spoke up and said, "Daddy, that wasn't God, was it?" I said, "What, son?" "Oh," he said, "those goings on there—that tongues and interpretation. That wasn't God. That wasn't the Spirit. That was just them doing it, wasn't it?" I thought to myself, That poor pastor swallowed it. I could tell by the way he acted. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. He thought it was wonderful what God was doing—and God wasn't doing a thing! It was just some people acting in the flesh, putting on a display. And a 9-year-old child knew the difference!

No wonder we lose our young people, friends. They want reality! They believe in reality. When we sit around and swallow everything and act like we don't know the difference between the real and the false, allowing just anything to happen, we lose them.

I've come to the place where I believe it's my responsibility to the young people to deal with the false. One reason why the hippie movement came into being was because the young people were sick and tired of frauds and fakes. They were looking for the genuine, even though they were looking in the wrong place. If we the Church won't give reality to them, who will? We should encourage people to love God, love people, and love other Christians—not separate the flock. Some people spend all their time fighting some other church they don't agree with.

- Kenneth E Hagin ( Judging Prophecy )

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