We started sharing with you my persuasion. I was surprised to find out that it was not a new persuasion that Jesus had redeemed the entire world. For a good Baptist Charismatic guy to come to those conclusions was quite a leap of faith. I think somebody even made a movie out of that. It really was a long way for me and it took years and years and years of literally hashing out every doctrine that had controlled my life of legalism, manipulation and control. It was easy to let go of as far as a heart perspective, but it wasn’t easy to let go of as far as a financial perspective and popularity because in the Word of Faith movement I was making about $10,000 per week and speaking to crowds of several thousands most every week of my life. So, the Gospel has not been financially or popularity wise beneficial to me as an individual but to my heart the Gospel has been the most wonderful thing that has happened to me personally. To have entertained the thought that Jesus Christ and His power and what He did, did not require man’s belief for Him to do for the human race what He came to do was unthinkable. It was not a thought that was entertained in the circles that I was in.

Many people ask how did you come to this. I really can’t tell you. I don’t know how because it took so long. I’m just that dense I guess. It took a long, long time and it took piece by piece of doctrines that I had held to for many, many years. There’s a funny thing about doctrines if you’re willing to be open-minded. That is that they either work or they don’t. If being involved in the Word of Faith movement I either had to stay in denial and say they did work or I had to come to grips with the fact they don’t work. I remember one of the first times when just coming that far to say it don’t work, I was teaching to a group of people who were in my movement. I was able to apply a little bit of grace to the situation and we spoke the unspeakable and we thought the unthinkable and at the end of the session, I just felt in my heart that the people were just wanting to say out loud, IT DON’T WORK. Because everybody knew it didn’t, you just couldn’t say it. It’s like any type of religious structure that you’re in where that the belief system is what holds the group together rather than love, joy, peace, and things like that stuff.

When the doctrine is what holds it together you can’t question the doctrine. When doctrine holds the group together, then you cannot think. When love, joy, peace and those things hold the group together you can ask any question you want. You can examine any possibility. But when doctrine is the glue, you’re stuck. You’re dead in the water. It just cannot be doctrine. I remember the time in my life when I resolved that everything I believed is subject to change because in whom I believe is not subject to change. Now that may sound very simplistic but that is what I had to do to free myself to think that no matter what happened to my doctrine my Savior was going to be the same, no matter what my doctrine changed. I realized there was a lot of people who believed that Jesus was Savior, who already had a lot of different doctrines anyway. So, why not go for it and see whether or not I believe my own doctrines. I wasn’t interested in finding out whether other people’s doctrines were true or not. I just couldn’t reconcile my own. I could not after a few years, believe that the doctrines I taught were true. For many reasons that became very, very obvious, nothing happened.

Nothing happened the way we said it would. Nothing happened the way we that we prescribed would happen if you followed it this route, believed this much, did this much, prayed these prayers, spoke these verses, what ever. All of us found out that we all had pretty much the same experiences of those who were not in our movement. The fact of it is, that movement is still going strong, but it has a great turn over of fate. Because the lure to a utopia life, here on earth that offers you the answers and the whys to everything that happens is very seducing. Everyone would love to understand why things happen in life but Forrest Gump beat us to that bumper sticker and just things happen. The desire to apply spirituality to all of our circumstances is a very deadly thing to happen. Circumstances are circumstances, life is life and you may never, ever, ever be able to connect a doctrine with what just happened to you today. When we begin to do that, at least in my own personal life, I watched the mental illness grow. I remember having a friend, a young man actually that we taught in Bible School and I watched it in many cases but this one stood out in my mind very much. He remained stable. He went through one of our Bible Schools and he was taught if you speak the word, if you do this, if you live this way, if you confess all of your sins, if you do this right, if you that right, then accidents don’t happen to you. Nothing but good comes to you and so on.

This young man wound up pulling out of parking lot and was broad sided. It was by comparison a relatively minor accident. But, it started a cataclysmic chain reaction in his mind that he eventually wound up in the mental institution from a relatively minor accident. When the accident happened it put in to question as to whether or not he was in God’s will, whether or not he had prayed enough, whether or not he had given enough, whether or not he was good enough, whether or not he was righteous enough. He became so insecure about everything in the circumstances in his life that fear just literally gripped his heart, that if he wasn’t doing good enough to get God to protect him from that circumstance then how could he have any confidence that walking out the door any moment would guarantee him that something cataclysmic wasn’t going to happen. I think mental and emotional health is accepting the fact that something cataclysmic could happen to any of us at any time. Life could end at any time, any moment, to anyone that we love, people we don’t know. We read about it in the papers every day.

The desire to be able to control those events is almost irresistible. It is understandably irresistible. That’s the reason I believe that a revelation of the Gospel is so mentally and emotionally stabilizing. It doesn’t divide people, this group from that group, but a revelation of the Gospel lets you know God views everyone exactly the same. There are no biggies, no littlies, there’s no difference. My beliefs and my doctrines do not change God’s beliefs about me. I’m certainly glad of that because what I think has changed a lot. However, the stability of the Gospel is not what I think about God, but the stability of the Gospel is found in what He thinks about me. And do you know what he thinks about me? Higher than anybody who loves me on this earth, He thinks I’m pretty cool. He loves me, he finds no fault in me, love never finds fault and that’s one of the characteristics of love in the love chapter. God is love; therefore, I must conclude that when God sees my life, He finds no fault.

The thing of it is, if I accept that for me of all of the jerks on earth that there happen to be, then the realization that if that is true for me, then when Jesus died on the Cross, God’s opinion of the entire earth changed for every human being. We have the possibility of nurturing and entire generation in the Gospel. I think the first thing that people are going to have to be freed from is modern day Evangelical Christianity. It is very deadly. It separates, it divides, it puts people on different levels. While trying to preach Christ it actually in the long run takes away from the Glory of the Cross. I am speaking as a person who spent 25 years in the Evangelical Christian community. It seems strange to separate the difference between being a believer and an Evangelical Christian. It’s not to say that Evangelical Christians aren’t believers, it’s just that they do not believe that Jesus redeemed the entire world. That’s the reason they’re evangelizing so desperately or maybe not so desperately.

If what the Evangelical community is preaching about us getting everybody redeemed so they can go to heaven, we don’t seem to be to terribly motivated to get people out of hell or avoid them from hell. That’s been one of the things I’ve spoken of to many of my friends. I said, you know regardless of whether you agree with me or not I can prove to you that you don’t believe your doctrine because you go to work every day, you work to get new cars, you work to have a nice home, a better home, you work to have decent clothes, clothes for your kids, you work for these things and the Bible says they’re all very temporary. Yet Evangelical Christianity tells us that unless an Evangelical Christian reaches the unbeliever and leads them in the prayer they’re going to go to hell. We either don’t believe it or we are the cruelest people with the greatest knowledge on the face of the earth that we would not care that much.

I believe what is happening in the heart of the Evangelical, as was happening in mine was that I severely doubted the doctrine but couldn’t voice my doubt. I’m coming to a conclusion of that even more and more by the fact that the people that we do share this with in the Evangelical Christian community, 95-99% are so willing and ready to convert, if you will, that it is just amazing. It’s addressing questions that they’ve had their entire lives about the issue. This Gospel that we’re hoping to share with you can be preached from any book, anywhere, all of the prophets spoke of it. I just had a very drastic, drastic influence on my heart when I began to study the issue of what does believing in Christ constitute. Does it gain your redemption? It’s when I began to realize that redemption can produce a believer but believing cannot produce redemption because redemption was done by Jesus Christ, by God. They worked it out together between themselves. They deliberately left the human race out of the redemption plan so they could include them in gifting the entire world with redemption and cleansing before the Throne of God.

As I began to look at that, I saw where Jesus said that the law of the psalms and the prophets spoke everything about Him. The prophets prophesied everything. How many of you know that He even said God wouldn’t do anything except He told the prophets? I went back and did a short study in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Habakkuk, Hosea, and Zephaniah, all of those that foretold about the Cross. They very conspicuously failed to include man’s belief as a part of man’s redemption. No prophet spoke of a time when the human race would be redeemed by the human race’s belief. Not one line. I sold out the Gospel at that point to be really honest with you, when I saw that I have all the prophets backing me up in this issue. In fact, they foretold of a time when Jesus would redeem the entire world at the point when man had no obedience or any belief what so ever. The prophecy was that there would be no such thing as faith in people. Jesus proved that with His own disciples. Everybody gradually turned away from Jesus until finally even His 12 elect turned from Him, just before he went to the Cross and bore their sin.

We talked about the issue of the sin that Jesus bore. We’re going to go in to that just a little bit more. How many of you here believe that the Bible teaches that Jesus bore the sin of the world on the Cross? Do you accept that? There are two things that I can find in the Bible that are defined as sin. One is a transgression of the law. Thank God we have the wonderful insight that teaches us that sin is a transgression of the law, but we also have the wonderful insight that is taught by Paul that where there is no law there is no transgression. You can’t transgress something that isn’t there. Why is the law no longer there? It was nailed to the Cross of Jesus Christ. So, it took care of sin as far as disobedience to the law once and for all at the Cross of Jesus Christ. Man’s constant going back for re-cleansing of his life by the Blood of Jesus, I believe is an insult to the ultimate victory of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The other sin that is spoken of and most of the people even in the Evangelical community agree, that the other sin, which is not an action of disobedience, it is a condition and it is called unbelief. Sin is unbelief; unbelief is sin. Did Jesus leave out the sin of unbelief when he went to the Cross to die for the sin of the whole world? Or did He, this is where we’re at, did Jesus also die for man’s unbelief as well as his disobedience? Wow. We finally came to the conclusion; at least most people came to the conclusion, that we are now free from the law, therefore, not judged by the law. If Jesus also died for the sin of unbelief, then we are also free from having to believe. Even the connotation is a little strange, ‘you have to believe’. I’ve changed that in my life. I no longer have to believe in Christ, I have the great honor and privilege of believing in Christ.

My belief does not generate redemption, but redemption has generated an incredible faith in my heart, that if God could have redeemed Mike Williams 2000 years before Mike Williams was ever born, if God could have foreseen all of this and said, I will redeem the world all by myself, because I love the creation that I created, then that is when faith in my heart, increased, it did not decrease. Something else increased and that is my desire to share this with other people. Evangelical friends told me, that if I preached this that no one would share the Gospel; if the whole world was redeemed why share the Gospel. It actually happens just the same. In the 90 – 99% of Evangelicals who have accepted what we are sharing, they have had the experience of going and sharing with their friends and people they come in contact with the Gospel, more now than when they believed the people that they needed to share with were going to go to hell if they didn’t.

Now that they know that they’ve been redeemed already, it’s such ‘Good News’ they just have to tell them. It’s not us against them, it’s not we’re heaven bound, you’re hell bound now you have to do what we did to become one of us. You are one of us. You already are redeemed. You have been given the gift of life freely, F-R-E-E-L-Y, freely, not by coercion of belief; not of being forced to believe or bow your knee. Belief should always be something that is a result of truth. If belief produces truth anything can be true. The fact is, belief does not validate truth. Truth validates belief. Belief cannot establish truth; truth can establish an incredible belief. Paul made the statement and we’ve gone through this before in Romans 1. It’s an incredible statement, Romans 1:16 Paul said, ‘for I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For there in is the righteousness of God revealed, as it is written the just shall live by faith’.

The verse doesn’t say what I said it said all of those years, that if you believed, you would become righteous. It said that it was a revelation of righteousness that produced belief. A far cry different than what Evangelical Christianity teaches that the belief produces the righteousness, but instead Paul declared that the Gospel that he wasn’t ashamed of, and you may have to decide whether or not you’re ashamed of this Gospel in front of not drunkards and prostitutes, but you may have to decided if you’re not afraid of this Gospel in front of the Evangelical Christian community. That may be where you’re going to have to lose your shame of the Gospel. To say, no, I believe that the whole world is redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb. That God did this by Himself and Thank God I understand it and I receive it and I am a believer and that does regenerate my heart, it renews my mind, it let’s me know I am right with God. I also then view myself differently, but I also then have the opportunity of viewing everyone on this earth very differently than I did before. I don’t view them as less than me. I don’t feel less than anyone else, I don’t feel more than anyone else. I can’t view anyone else on the face of the earth as more than me. More important, less important, more righteous, less righteous, more holy, less holy, more spiritual, less spiritual.

Suddenly there is a completely even playing field in the respect of life as God has given it and as God has chosen to impute that life based on His own faith. Paul made it very clear and it’ restated, especially in King James version, it’s repeated several times, he said we were redeemed by the faith of Jesus Christ. He didn’t say we were redeemed by our own faith. Jesus authored and finished faith; he fulfilled the law and nailed it to the tree, authored finished faith. The only two requirements ever on the human race were to keep the law and to believe. Could it be that Jesus fulfilled both requirements, not one, but both requirements for redemption? Wow.

I’ve had people tell me, ‘Brother Mike, I don’t agree with you, but I sure wish what you said was true.’ Isn’t it amazing that the Gospel could be such good news that even people who don’t believe it wish it were true? Paul said the Gospel is not a demand for righteousness. Paul did not say it is a revelation of how to become righteous, he said it is a revelation ‘of righteousness’ that will produce believers that can then experience what … salvation. Salvation is not redemption. Redemption brings salvation to the soul. Paul taught salvation as what happens to you, not what happens to God when you believe; not what happens to the redemptive power of Christ, but instead it’s that acceptance that renews the mind and believe me it does renew the mind. It changes your whole perspective on everything and every body. The way you view issues, the way you view people, the way you view yourself is completely revolutionized when you see that you’re believing in Christ doesn’t produce redemption, it is an acknowledgement of the redemption that’s been given.

There has always been this debate in Christian community as to is salvation instantaneous thing or is it a process? The fact of it is Paul speaks of it many times saying it’s a process. Paul says that we are not of them that draw back to destruction, but believe to the saving of the soul. The soul isn’t the spirit; the soul is the mind, the will and the emotions. Paul said if you believe this Gospel long enough, it will save the way you think. It will save the emotions, it will bring salvation, which simply means that believing will cause you to think about yourself the same way God sees you. Folks, that’s getting saved. That is saved to the uttermost. If God views you as holy already, if God views you as righteous already, if God views you as redeemed already, if God views you as His own already can you imagine what a transforming thing it would be to find that out and actually believe it?

You see, when we preach that believing produces these things, then we live in terror as to whether or not we believe good enough. The fact is you never believe ‘good enough’, but the belief that you have will transform the soul. The transformation that comes will cause you to become an even greater believer. It will cause you to believe more. It will cause you to be a person of greater faith as the soul transforms to the truth, instead of your belief system establishing truth. Something that’s true, is true whether people believe it or not. Truth is not established once a person believes something. It’s like gravity, whether you believe in gravity or not, you can say, ‘I don’t believe in gravity’, it’s still affects you every day. Your non-belief does not take away factual truth. This truth of redemption is as factual as gravity. It’s as factual as any natural law that you know. It’s a spiritual law, but the fact of it is, this spiritual law was all inclusive of the entire human race, the same way that God designed the whole universe. Paul said you wouldn’t have to have somebody preach to you out of here, all you’d have to is look at nature and it would tell you about this great Gospel.

How many people does gravity affect? How many people do the laws of nature affect? They affect everybody equally. They do not affect people on different levels. Whether you accept them, believe them, deny them, defy them, what ever, you can’t change them. It’s the same with this incredible spiritual law so to speak, that God was in Christ, redeeming the world unto Himself, not counting their sins against them. Wow. What did God do? He was in Christ. What was he doing in there? He was redeeming some of the world, redeeming the whole world. Once He did, what would he never do again, never count their sins against them, never again.

Do you realize that Evangelical Christianity thrives on sin held against you? That’s the way it thrives. It is a guilt motivated performance mentality to achieve goodness that when it breaks down, it breaks down cataclysmically in life. When that belief system is exercised to it’s fullest, it will come to an end and it will lead to a mental and emotional break down because the mind and soul have been taught that these things are true ‘if’ and this is right ‘if’, and this happens ‘if’ and finally you do everything that you know to do and it doesn’t turn out the way you’ve been told it’s going to turn out and it leads to mental and emotional breakdown. I can tell you who is in the mental institutions of America. I have been there. I spent six terms there, yes you can say, no we know where he got his doctrine. That’s quite all right. I spent six terms in mental institutions as a young teenager and in to my early 20’s. A term is any amount of time. I was in there anywhere from a weekend to six months.

Later I read a statistic that over 70% of all of the people in mental institutions in America are professing born again believers in Jesus Christ. I knew that to be true because all of us in there talked about God. Everybody in the mental institution talked about Jesus, some of us were Jesus; we were spiritual people. Some of us were Moses, Mary Magdalene, and John the Baptist. When that pressure to be spiritual is put upon the flesh, it alters the mind in to a delusional state. Let me state that again, when the pressure is on to make the flesh spiritual, it alters the mind to a delusional state of denial. You cannot accept the facts; you cannot deal with truth. It cannot be faced.

I believe this Gospel Revolution is vitally important for every human being. I am very motivated to share this Gospel. I see people becoming motivated to share it, who cross that line and depart from Evangelical Christianity. It’s a scary thing for me to realize I am no longer a part of the Evangelical Christian community. That was weird. Jerry Falwell wouldn’t want me in his church. Oh my God. Pat Robertson wouldn’t have me. Paul Crouch wouldn’t want me; I used to speak on their TV programs. I’ve been there; I’ve done all of that. I tell you what, there is a vast difference between finding your approval with men and finding your approval with God and finding your approval is not based in your works, or how well you perform for God or men, but how well Jesus performed His duties as Lord and Savior when he came to this Earth and died for the entire human race. The Gospel is not a demand for righteousness; it’s a revelation of a righteousness that already exists. Good news?

Turn to Romans chapter 5. It’s really hard to jump in, in the middle of anywhere, but we’re going to do this to take in the last part of this chapter. Romans 5:6; ⁶You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Who did he die for, the ungodly. ⁷Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. That’s just an understandable comparison that if there’s a really good person, somebody might even give their life for them. But, this is Jesus dieing for the ungodly, not a good man, not good people. ⁸But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How was God’s love manifested for us? Was it manifested for us when we became believers? No, it was manifested when Christ for the ungodly, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.