The name of God continually revealed Himself until Jesus came along, and then one writer said it this way, that God saw fit to give Him the name that was above every other name, whether that name be written in heaven or written in earth or under the earth, that the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. That the nature of journeying with God requires us to be flexible and humble - listen to me. I have something on my heart for this church tonight. I want you to listen to me very carefully. If this church is going to be a kingdom church then you have to move with what God's doing. There are churches in this world that were kingdom churches that are no longer kingdom churches, and it's not because they're bad people. It's just they quit growing. They quit moving. It's just because they quit moving with what God was doing. Listen, what worked yesterday is not going to work today and what works today for sure will not work tomorrow. In any corporation, any business, anything you're doing you have to challenge the process constantly in order to change what's going on. Change, transition, things like that are good and listen, you guys all have your own walk with God. You all have your own walk with God and so you guys journey with God and if God tells you something different you go with what God tells you.
But I'm telling you this; in the next 15 years the happening, relevant churches will be churches that are defined by two things. One is the supernatural move of God; two is social justice. Those two things will define the next relevant church. Relevancy has been the buzz word in the church. What do we do to be relevant? There's churches all over the world trying to be more and more relevant, so what do they do? They build prettier buildings. What do they do? They make rules about the age of people on stages. What do they do? They start changing how they dress, as if the shirt you wear makes you relevant or not. It doesn't make you relevant at all. It has nothing to do with relevance. What it is is good hearted people seeking to be more relevant, and I'm telling you I know this as sure as I'm standing here. The churches that the next generation are going to flock to are not churches with the most sophisticated programs. They're the churches that have the supernatural power of God and are focussed on making other people's lives better, the down and outer, the people who have less. Those churches will be the most relevant churches in the next 15 years.
Now you can take that as a prophetic word. You can take that as wisdom from a teacher, or you can take that as a thought from a redneck from South Carolina. However you want to take it you take it, but I'm telling you it's the truth. For us, for us to be kingdom people we have to be determined to bring heaven to every situation and not rest on our laurels that we're going to heaven one day. We have to be determined to bring heaven to every situation and not rest on the fact that we can come here on Sunday morning and have great praise and worship. Is it good to have great praise and worship? Sure. Is it good to stand up and pray in the spirit and worship God? Absolutely. Is that the end of anything? No. It should be the beginning of everything, that the church found it's origins at a place called Sinai. We're going to talk about that later. The church found it's origins at a place called Sinai. At Sinai God told them this. God said I want you to be a kingdom of priests. Now these guys were already forgiven. They were already delivered from Egypt. They were already in covenant with Abraham. They were already all this stuff.
He said this is what I want you to do. I want you to come regularly and meet in My presence so that you can take what you get out of My presence and make everybody else's life better. It wasn't an end-all, be-all. It was I want you to be a group of people who are determined to show the whole world what God would look like. The whole world needs to see what Jesus would look like, and this is going to ultimately bring us to a generous spirit which I'll talk about later. But to be kingdom people we have to constantly ask ourself the right questions, and so there's some scriptures tonight I want to look at with you that bring up some questions about what sort of kingdom person am I, what sort of kingdom person am I. So I want to start tonight with the story of the Alabaster Box of Perfume, the story of the Alabaster Box of Perfume. There are actually two instances where Jesus - because it's in different gospels it looks like there's only one instance, but when you read it close enough you realise there are actually two.