God’s kind of training. 2 Timothy 2 verse 2 says, And the things that you have heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. And then in Philippians 4 verse 9, Those things that you have also learned and received and heard and seen in me put into practice.
And the God of peace will be with you. Have you ever been to a formal training seminar? You know, one of those ones where you pay far too much money to go and sit and listen to somebody talk for three days. Ever been to one of those? They’re a great outing.
You get to meet a lot of people. They sometimes have good eats between. And sometimes, sometimes the seminar actually is also inspiring.
And you go there and you sit and they talk for two hours at a time. And then maybe you just have a short break and then they talk again for another two hours. And then you go and eat some food and they come back and they talk for another three hours.
And at the end of the day, your head is spinning. And you think, wow, such awesome knowledge. And the next day it goes on again.
And you go on really the long ones, it goes for three days that way. And by the third day, your head is so full of knowledge. You’re just so wound up with all these new things that you’ve learned.
And you kind of got different responses according to how intelligent you are. You might leave all fired up thinking, that’s wonderful. I’m going to go out and conquer the world.
I’m going to do all the things that they taught. And within a day, you begin to wonder just how much you remembered of what they taught. Because they just poured out so much in such a short space of time.
And you now have to go back and spend the next six months going through the materials that they gave you and if they gave you DVDs or audio CDs to go and re-listen to the whole thing all over again to try and remember what you were taught. And I’ll guarantee that six months down the line, when they have another similar seminar, you’ll have to go again because you forgot everything that they taught you. You retained so little of what you learned during that time.
Why? It’s just too much information. Your brain cannot absorb that much in such a short space of time. Now this is the training method of the world and it’s very effective in making money.
It’s not very effective in training people. The biblical principle of training was always having a personal trainer. It’s now the way you can do it.
But today we have technology. We have many things available to us that we can use to train. But we need to understand some of the basic mechanics involved in imparting knowledge from one person to another.
Can someone go and see to that? I’d like to look at four different aspects of learning. The most important thing that I’d like to emphasize is that you never get it the first time. And just like that training seminar, perhaps on a lower level you can think of watching a movie.
Have you ever noticed when you watch a movie you’re really inspired and then you watch the movie again some months later and maybe even some years later and you think back on that movie and you think, wow, that was such a good movie. I really enjoyed it. I’d love to watch it again.
And when you watch it again, you find things that are happening in that movie that you don’t remember happened the first time you watched it. In fact, a lot of the time you can’t even remember what’s going to happen next. You know like, yeah, in the end, yeah, the good guy won, but I can’t remember how he got there.
You don’t remember all of it. But what is really great when you watch the movie the second time, especially if you’ve watched it recently, is you know what’s coming and this time you notice all the little things that you didn’t see before. You notice certain little events, certain little statements that are made that never meant anything to you before, but now that you watch the movie and know where it’s going, now you understand where all the pieces fit.
Ah, so that’s why he said that. So that’s why she did that. Ah, that was the important thing about them leaving that out.
Now it all makes sense. The pieces come together. You know, the first time I watched it, I never really could figure out why the heck they did it that way.
Of course, now I see it. I see it. You watch your movie the third time and now you can almost rewrite the story.
It all starts to fall together and you got it. But how often do we watch the same movie again? Oh, they’re churning them out by the hundreds all the time. Every week new movies.
Who gets time to go back and watch an old one? Probably just oldies like me who like feel-good movies and there’s so few of them that if you want to go and see a feel-good movie, there’s no new ones. You’ve got to go and look at the old ones again and see you absorb some good stuff from it. Now when we come to training, we’ve got to use repetition.
Repetition is the most important quality of all and I’ll be speaking about that as we go along. A person does not learn the first time. No matter how good your teaching method is, no matter how clear you made it, a person doesn’t learn the first time.
They need a few extra things to help them and the most important quality that’s needed is repetition. Now how do we learn things? Paul actually gave us a very good indication there in that one verse. The first one he said, the things that you’ve heard of me among many witnesses commit these things to faithful men.
Well, kind of sounds like Paul’s holding a lot of seminars. And then he says to the Philippians, the things that you have also learned and received and heard and seen in me. He didn’t just say, you know all those things I taught you? Go do them.
He explained it a little bit better. He said you learned them. You didn’t just hear about, you learned these things and you received them.
You took them for yourself and you heard what I said and you saw what I did. He said I’ve given you a full training. Now that you’ve learned these things, there’s one more important thing that will seal your knowledge and that’s what you do with it.
Say, you know what? I can show you every chord on the guitar. I’ve memorized all of them. So play guitar for me.
Oh, I haven’t got to that yet. But ask me a chord, I’ll tell you what it is. So what was the point? You learned the guitar chord so that you could teach other people what the guitar chords are.
You never learned to play the guitar and you can’t teach anybody else to play it. There’s got to be something practical to your learning. You know, there are people that are ever learning and ever coming to the knowledge of the truth, the Bible says.
The people are filling their heads with knowledge and education and so they boast and all this knowledge they have. And now you’ve gone to university and you’ve got degrees and you’ve got masters and you’ve got doctors and you’ve got all this knowledge and in the end there’s only one thing that you can do with it. Teach other people what you know.
You got educated so that you could educate somebody to get educated to educate somebody and nobody ever learns anything. Just a load of head knowledge. You know, it’s no good knowing about the Bible.
Scripture says that Satan knows the Bible and he trembles. He knows it better than you. Jesus soon found that out and Satan came with a temptation and Satan quoted the word better than most preachers.
It’s not good enough to know the word. It’s got to go beyond that. And so the first important quality, the first important procedure involved in training and in learning and in receiving training is learning through hearing.
Learning through hearing. What happens when you hear something? What remains in your mind of what you heard becomes knowledge. And so you can become educated by learning.
But how much of what you heard did you remember? At the end of this message if I were to sit each one of you down and say now tell me exactly every point that I preached tonight it would be great if you could remember one of them and if you remember two you’re a star. I’ll guarantee that at the end of this message you would have said that was a great message and tomorrow if I were to ask so do you remember what I preached yesterday and you’ll say yeah I remember it was a great message. What was it about again? And we’re churning them out just like that seminar.
One after the other. Man that’s such good stuff. Oh this is such good stuff.
Man this is, you know what you’re walking around taking a bite out of each fruit and saying they all taste good but you never got to eat any of it. You just bit it and spat it out. So we had a wonderful fruit platter there.
Man I could taste every one of them. But I didn’t get time to eat them. You’ve got to absorb the knowledge.
Now how are you going to do that? Go and listen to it again and the next time you hear it you’ll pick up something you didn’t hear before and then go and listen to it again and again and again and every time you hear it every time you hear it you will remember and absorb a bit more than you did before. And we don’t have time to do that when you’ve got a dozen hour long messages. We don’t have time to do that do we? You know the wonderful opportunity that we have with media that’s not available to people that are educated by somebody standing up and speaking.
Where a teacher stands up and speaks live in a class. How much of that can you remember? I’ll tell you how. He tells you to go and read in the textbook everything he’s taught and that’s actually when you really learnt it if you bothered to go and read which most of us don’t do because we don’t feel like it.
You’ve got to hear it again and again repetition repetition and you will eventually absorb and hold everything that you heard. Now, when are you going to get time to do this? You’re going to have to make time to do it. And you know if you could just take one set of teachings and listen to them over and over until you remember everything that was taught your knowledge on that would be something that would never leave you.
It will be with you forever. And when you open your mouth to speak what’s going to come out is what you put in. You know the reason a lot of us are so ignorant is because we were just too lazy to go and re-listen.
And yet it’s so easy. You could do it while driving in the car. You could do it while cooking in the kitchen.
You could use so many hours in the day. There are hours there. But we got the idea that I must specifically put something on and listen to it.
Well, maybe somebody else might have to put it on and make you listen to it. Maybe somebody else has to discipline your will. And we’ll get to that shortly.
Okay, the second method of learning is learning through seeing. Now this is a great one because when you hear something there’s a picture not just words that you heard. See, listening to something you could close your eyes and that might help.
Otherwise you concentrate on something else and forget what you’re listening. But seeing is great. You see the speaker stand up there and you see him say all these things and that kind of helps.
But it requires more than watching somebody speak. You need to watch somebody actually showing and doing what needs to be done. But you know there’s a lot less misunderstanding when somebody demonstrates something and you see it than when somebody explains it to you.
Because when you hear the words you develop pictures in your mind from the words, don’t you? So if somebody gives an explanation and says, okay, now, if you want to adjust the height of this pulpit here, if you look down below the main part of the pulpit you’ll see there’s two clips and each one holds a different section of the podium. Now, if you reach out and take a clip with your hand and pull it, it releases the pole and then you can move it up or down to where you want it. Then if you push the clip back in place again it will hold.
Now there are two clips because there’s three sections to the pulpit and so you need to adjust the bottom one first and then the top one until you get the right height. See, now you’re seeing this pulpit so you’re probably understanding it a bit better but if you were listening to this and you’d never seen what this pulpit looked like you wouldn’t have a clue what I’m talking about. You’d say, yeah, okay, can I see the pulpit? Maybe I’ll know what you’re talking about.
See? See, but if I stood here and I actually did this and I moved it, ah, there we go, we put it in place and then we clip it and then we got the big one and that adjusts quite a lot and then we put it in place and then we clip it back, you know exactly how to do it now. You saw me do it. You saw me do it.
It’s very important that we use visual methods in our training and that’s why in modern technology audio-visual has become the in thing. To hear somebody describe it and to see them do it, the pictures are easy to remember and you know, you may only actually have to see the picture once to remember. Now if the person did a whole lot of different things, a whole lot of complicated things, like if I was showing you on a computer screen how to run a piece of software and I said it’s easy, you click here, you drag there, you press that button over there, shift control over here, press this on the keyboard and you’re lost.
You’re lost unless I go very slowly and say, okay see, watch my cursor. See I’m going up there to that menu option, see I’m clicking file, you notice a menu drops, you see now you’re watching that and I’m doing it very carefully. Then you can remember.
Hopefully you can remember. But you know I’ve done a dozen different things just to make that change in the document and can you remember those dozen different, see even though you’ve seen it, even though you actually saw me do it and you say I can do that, you can’t remember it because there’s too much to remember. And so again, you need more than just simple seeing.
You may need somebody to do it for you again. That was really great. Could you do that again? Because I missed that one part that you did.
I was thinking about someone else and I was looking at a different part of the screen. I didn’t see where you put the cursor and did you click that with the left mouse or the right? You didn’t say it. And so the person does it again.
Okay, let me show you. Oh yes, I got that there. Okay, got that, got that, got that, got that.
Okay, now I understand it. Okay, let me give it a try. We click that one, we click that one.
What was the next one again? I know I watched him do it, but I can’t remember what was the next step. You been there? You can’t learn by just watching somebody do something. It requires a lot more than that unless you are a very observant person with a photographic memory who can remember exactly everything that you see.
I’m one of those who isn’t. I see a show of hands. Right, exactly.
Exactly. So, what is the third most important principle that’s involved in training and in learning? It’s doing. It’s doing.
It’s not enough to hear, it’s not enough to see. You require more than that. You actually have to do it yourself.
And when you do it yourself, somehow it locks it into your understanding. Now, the first time you try doing something yourself, you might feel very awkward. You watch somebody do something and it seems so easy.
And you think, I could do that. And then they say, OK, here it is, you give it a try. And you say, no, no, no, it’s OK, I’ll go and play around with it at home.
Because you know you’re going to do something stupid. You know you’re going to click on the wrong thing. And they’re going to say, no, no, no, that way.
We feel that way, we feel insecure. The expert now has told me how to do it. And yeah, it looks easy enough, I’m sure I could learn how to do it.
But you know, I really don’t think I’d like to try in front of everybody right now in case I mess it up. I feel foolish. But you know, that’s the problem.
People out there, they’ve got the knowledge, they want to train. And they think that by speaking long flowery words and talking for hours at a time, that people are going to learn. And then after you say, but I preached it.
I’ve taught it. You’ve heard this, surely you should know it by now. And people come on my Bible questions board and ask stupid questions that I’ve already answered.
In fact, even after I tell them to go to the materials that we produced, that we recorded live, that we transcribed, that you can listen to and read. And they say, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it. I bought those.
I read them. Then why are you coming and asking me these questions? I already answered them. Or didn’t I explain it well? Well, I like to think I actually did a pretty good job.
I like to think that my teaching ability is really good. I like to think that people would have understood when they heard it. And you know what? They probably did understand it.
They just didn’t remember it. The most important method of all is to get people to become involved in the training. They’ve got to be part of it.
They’ve got to… Now, in the world, we call that hands-on training. Hands-on training. Okay.
How does hands-on training work? You need somebody, firstly, to show you how it’s done and then to sit and watch you do it, encourage you and make you feel comfortable, not expect you to get it perfect the first time, and someone who will point out when you do it wrong. You know, don’t sit and watch the guy do it and say, good boy, when you really messed it up bad. Well, let’s say, that was pretty good for a first try.
You’ll get it right. No, you won’t. You won’t, because that’s the way you did it the first time.
You’ll do it that way the second time and the third time also. Training involves getting involved with people and making sure that they do it right. So when he does it wrong, you say, now, hang on, hang on.
Go back there. You did it wrong. You clicked in the wrong place.
You clicked the wrong button. Now, go back, do it again. Go back, do it again.
Okay, now we got it right. Go do it again. Do it right.
Okay, now you got it perfect. Now, let’s go to the next one, and let’s do that, and let’s do that, and let’s do that. And maybe you may have to actually say, look, just get out of the chair.
Let me get back in there and show you again. Now, watch. See, now the person is watching and listening after they’ve tried.
See, now that’s a good training method. It’s really very basic and very simple. It’s human nature.
It’s the way God has made us. You say, okay, now that I’ve showed you, now you come give it a try again. Now the person goes and he says, ah, yes, I see where I went wrong.
I did that, and I did that. And then he gets it right. See, you’ve got to do something over and over again until it becomes a habit.
But if you do it over and over again the wrong way, guess what habit you formed? The wrong one. Don’t tell somebody just go home and practice. Well, you know he got it wrong the first time.
You know, but he’s going to go practice. He’s going to go practice doing it wrong. Well, the Lord will give revelation.
In time, you’ll get it. No, you won’t. In fact, he’ll come to believe that the way he’s doing it is the right way.
And horror of horrors, he’s going to go teach it to somebody else. And they’re going to do it the wrong way as well. Maybe add some of their wrong methods and it gets worse.
It’s a bad training method. And people develop their own bad habits because nobody bothered to take the time and effort to show the person stage by stage and to watch them do it and to test them and to correct them when they did it wrong. And you might get away with that in the world.
But we’re speaking about spiritual training here. We’re speaking about taking the principles of God’s word. We’re speaking about taking the power of the Holy Spirit and training other people how to use it.
Training people what the word teaches and how to use the word. We got to get it right. And it’s going to take an effort.
And it’s wonderful to stand up and give the big training seminars and to make a lot of money out of it and everybody to go out and say, Man, he’s such an awesome preacher. And they’re going to come back to the next seminar to hear the awesome preacher again because they forgot what he said last time. I did a little test not long ago.
And even some of you fell for it. I took an old lecture of mine. I was doing, I think, the thing on finances.
And I took The Way of Prosperity, a lecture from The Way of Blessing, Walking in Prosperity. I took the transcript of it and I released a piece of it each week in the email course. And everybody started to rave and say, Oh, that is such good teaching.
We’ve just never heard it put that way before. I said, Sure you have. Go read The Way of Blessing.
Oh yeah, I’ve read The Way of Blessing. Oh, you obviously didn’t remember much of it, did you? Because I just took it word for word straight from The Way of Blessing and put out a piece every week and everybody thought, Wow, awesome teaching. Good new stuff.
We proved this in training in the Bible school that until we take the person and make them go back through the lecture and apply it, give them projects to do, to go and read it and analyze it and break it down and apply it to their lives, suddenly they wake up and they get it. People that have bought our books and read them long time ago, people that even bought some of the types of CDs and listened to them, they suddenly see things that they never saw before. It’s going to take an effort.
It’s going to cost you time and effort to get involved in the lives of people and to train them correctly. We’ve got to make them practice the right way until they form the new habit. And then once it’s formed, once that knowledge is sunken in, it’ll be with them for the rest of their lives.
They’ll never lose it. But there’s one more important quality and this is a very difficult one to fully grasp. It’s a very difficult one to implement and one that most of us are not fully aware of.
The final and most important stage of training God’s way is impartation. You see, the knowledge must go beyond the head. It’s got to get down into the soul and into the spirit.
And only when it gets down there does it become knowledge that can be used again and again. There’s a spiritual quality involved in training that the world doesn’t know about but they do carry it out. And you can watch people who hang around with other people.
They get together in their little groups and they call each other and they act like each other. And eventually you can pull any one of them out and they all look the same. Why? Because they open their hearts to one another and receive something far greater than knowledge.
They receive a spiritual impartation. Now when you open your heart to somebody else, you will receive. You will receive not only what that person knows as you listen to them.
You will not only do things the way the person does it because they showed you how to do it and you copied the way they did it. And those are all good parts of training. But there comes something far deeper than that.
There comes a spiritual force that when a person stands up and preaches, you could say, well, it’s quite clear that he believes the same as those people at GMRN because he’s preaching the same doctrine they do. So he got the knowledge. You could say he stands up there and he walks backwards and forwards behind the pulpit just like Les Krauss.
He even got the twitch. He’s copying him. He sounds the same.
He plays music the same with the same style. But then there comes something far deeper than that. There comes an anointing.
There comes a spiritual influence. And when you sense that, you know. You know that the person has picked up far more than knowledge.
They’ve picked up a spiritual DNA. And even though they may stand up there in their individuality, doing things their own way, there’s a quality, there’s something there that you can’t put your finger on. But you know.
It was said of the early disciples, they looked at them and noted that they had been with Jesus. How did they know? It was a quality that was showing there. They were looking just like him.
And when you were in that person’s presence, you felt like you were there. I remember hearing a story, a missionary type story, of how these missionaries came to a place to come and tell about Jesus and his love and what he was like. And they said, oh yes, we know him.
He used to live here. I said, what? Turns out there was a man of God that was so humble and so full of the Lord. And when they tried to describe what Jesus was, they’d already seen somebody who was just like that.
Yeah, we know him. We know all about him. You don’t have to tell us.
We’ve seen it. See, now that is training. That is training God’s way.
That’s what Paul was speaking about you. The things that you’ve learned and received and heard and seen in me. Go and do it.
Go and put those things into practice. Go and act just like me. Go and be just like me.
Go and give out everything that you’ve received from me. How? And to whom? The things you’ve heard of me among many witnesses. The same commit to faithful men.
Faithful men who will what? They’ll be able to also teach others. They’re not going to give out the knowledge just so other people can say, Well, you know, I know as much as Les Cross. I’ve studied all his stuff.
I’ve listened to all his teaching. I’ve watched him preach. I’ve attended every seminar and every conference that he’s ever been in.
You know what? There’s nothing that you can tell me about the guy. I know it. I know everything about him.
In fact, I can even stand up and preach like him. I can hold my body the same as him. Awesome.
So, how many people have you taught to do this? Oh, no. It costs me a lot of money and time and effort to get all this stuff. You know, if somebody else wants to do it, they can go and buy all the tapes and attend the seminars themselves.
See, it’s not faithful men. Don’t waste your time trying to train people like that. I don’t want to waste my time training people so they can all say, Well, I’ve got this great knowledge so I can have thousands of people out there who believe just like me.
That’s not the goal. The goal is to take people who are prepared to take all that you have, receive it with open hearts, all of it, and then take it and go and give it to others who will give it to others who will give it to others. That’s God’s kind of training.
It’s taking everything you can and giving it out to as many people as you can. You don’t have to be like a sponge. You say, More, more.
Well, I’ve been preaching for three hours already. More. You know what? Paul stood and preached through the night.
One poor guy fell asleep and nearly died. The rest of the people did not complain. They were faithful men.
They took what Paul had to teach and they distributed it to others. Who are you? Where do you fit into this picture? In conclusion, there’s no substitute for having a live person to teach you. You need more than just to yell.
You need more than just to see. You need more than just to do. You need somebody who can be there to reinforce it, to test it, to correct you, to change you, to mold you, and above all, to impart to you of everything that’s in their spirit that they have received from the Lord.
You know, it may have taken such a person 50 years to get that. And you can get it in a matter of days, weeks, and months instead of having to live the same period of time. We need training courses, but we also need hands-on training.
When we put all those together, we get the full impartation, we get a full transmission of all of the most vital principles that God wants his church to have. And so it goes on. One gives to the next, and that person takes everything and begins to train the next.
We don’t have to have a few little qualified trainers. God’s called every one of us. Now I don’t want to train the masses.
I want to train the faithful men and women. I want to train and pour everything into them, and then I’m looking and expecting that they will do exactly the same thing. They will watch how I did it, and they will go and do it themselves and pour into others.
And in that way, you can multiply yourself. In that way, you can take what God’s given you and just get it to spread throughout the body of Christ. That’s God’s kind of training.
Amen.