Sid:My guest Al Houghton I’m speaking to him at his home in Anaheim, California has just come out with a book called “The Sure Mercies of David” which has finally recaptured what the first church understood about the gospel. Al as you’ve been explaining we have been specializing here in America especially in this 21st century in only half of the gospel message, explain.
Al: Sid we have Jesus the Savior in every dimension and we have majored on Him for 40 years.By that I mean we have majored on Jesus the Savior, Jesus the Healer, Jesus as baptizer in the Holy Spirit, deliverer, soon coming King. We have talked about mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy, but there is another side of Jesus that appears when He ascended and sat at the right hand of God. And this is the half of Jesus that we have not presented the church and we have the fruit.The fruit is that there is no fear of God in the government because there is no fear of God in the church. We have abandoned Jesus the Judge in order just to preach Jesus the Savior we’ve gone too seeker sensitive and we just don’t tell people the tough things anymore and now we’re living with the fruit of it and the fruit of it is loss of freedom. When I discovered Jesus the Judge in the book of Revelation I realized I had been ministering a formula almost my whole life up to that point. And I realized instead of following the Spirit…
Sid:How can you have intimacy with a formula?
Al: You can’t! You absolutely can’t!Not only that you teach formula Christianity everywhere you go and it hurts everyone you minister to because you set them up for situations where they’re going to meet a Jesus you didn’t tell them about. And that is the Jesus of Justice, the Jesus of Judgment, the Jesus who in the book of Revelation is very different from Jesus in the gospels.They’re two streams of His ministry, one is healing and deliverance and stilling the storm and the other is sending a storm when there isn’t repentance and that’s precisely where I believe our nation is right now. Because when we allow the things that we have started to allow in the last 30 years the Bible says “We will no longer be able to defend our land.”The land cries out because of fullness of iniquity and it begins to vomit out the inhabitance, translation simply means you can no longer defend your land against attack from without or within.
Sid:Have we past the point of no return in the United States of America and Canada?
Al: Well, that’s the good news, well Sid as a church we have if we do not get a hold of the covenant of sure mercy, I believe the covenant of sure mercy is the answer for the remnant church and the good news is that when Gideon was sent God sent the 30,000 home and he knocked it down to 300 historically God uses a small group to turn things.
Sid:Now you talk in your book about the prophecy the end time prophecy in Daniel chapter 11 verse 32; would you explain.
Al: Those who know their God shall be strong and do exploits. I discovered I only knew half of the Jesus I needed to know, I did not know the half of Jesus that would carry me through the opposition into victory. For example the Apostle Paul and Barnabas are sent to a region and they encounter a false prophet.He has the whole region locked up and they can’t get in and all of a sudden Paul uncharacteristically says “Behold the hand of the Lord is coming upon you and your going to be blind for a season.” Well, the gospel of Jesus that we preached for years all He does is opened blind eyes, well in Acts 13 He closed some seeing eyes and he made them blind. Justice came in that situation in order that people could be saved and set free; now that’s what the covenant of sure mercy enables and that’s why it’s so essential where we are right now.
Sid:Now I can see why it’s so essential for a nation; let’s bring it down to the individual level and you started to tell me a story on yesterday’s broadcast.
Al: I did.This covenant works because it’s a covenant about justice, and a covenant about justice, about two things: mercy and justice. God gave David mercy and He gave him justice. When we invoke the covenant of sure mercy we get both mercy and justice, now there was a man named, he’s a PhD. now his name is Dr. Roger Sapp. Roger in his military career the Lord impressed him to go into the army to become a chaplain. He’s in OCS they rotate to about 20 different guys in and each one takes a turn, he’s the only one whose giving witness about being a Christian.This one individual began to harass him unmercifully day after day after day, this went on for 30 days. Now you only got four months in OCS you write each other and the people on the bottom sometimes don’t graduate, he was being accused of being a homosexual, he was I mean just everything you can imagine, this man was continually making fun of him, harassing him, finally then he started on his wife and finally Roger had enough and he said, “If you don’t stop God’s going to deal with you.” And then this guy called the whole group out, and said, “Hey guys come and hear this, come and hear this baloney and they said, “Roger did you really say that that God is going to get him.”He said, “What I said was “God is going to stand up in my behalf because this is not right and it’s injust, it’s unjust there’s no justice in this, there’s no truth in this.” Well, the very next day this individual who was harassing him was leading the platoon and they are running in march step to class and he trips over a shell casing, the whole platoon ends up on top of him, he screams they all un-pile, he’s broken his leg in three places, everybody in that platoon looked at Roger and said, “Oh, my Gosh,” the guy had to have a complete cast from hip to toe he ended up not graduating. As a result a revival broke out in the class, six of them got saved, the rest of them at one time or another came to Roger for prayer, the whole situation turned around in 24 hours when he took a stand and proclaimed that the God of justice would stand up in his behalf. That’s an example of the covenant of sure mercy in manifestation.
Sid:Now how long have you’ve been teaching the covenant of sure mercy in precatory mercy?
Al: The sure mercy side I’ve been teaching for 6 years since 1998, the imprecatory mercy…
Sid:And please explain imprecatory.
Al: (Laughing)
Sid:For me too, (Laughing)
Al: Imprecatory, if you look up and imprecatory in the dictionary you probably won’t like it, it’s simply means to bring forth a judgment, or sometimes they call it to bring forth a curse. But the real issue on imprecatory based on what we…it’s just a word that we use to describe how David prayed in the Psalms when he stood on the covenant of sure mercy. And some PhD must have invented it, but anyway we sort of inherited it.It’s a term that describes how David prayed on his covenant when he encountered and adversary that was too strong for him and he would put that adversary in God’s hands and for 2 years I kept hearing this “You don’t know David, you don’t know David, you don’t know David, you don’t know David.” And I thought God “What do you mean I don’t know David?” And I thought “Okay, how am I going to learn what David was like, what his heart was like.Then the Lord reminded me Sid of Acts chapter 15 where they were trying to settle this law and grace issue and they came on this prophecy that promised that God would return and rebuild the tabernacle of David that had fallen down. He would rebuild its ruins, he would set it up so that the rest of mankind could seek the Lord. There’s something about the heart of David and the covenant of sure mercy that enables us to get a harvest of cities and nations. And when we go back to Amos 9 and read it Sid it give you the foundation for something I’ve heard you say “When this nation attempts to persuade Israel to give away some of their land, then we end up catching a judgment or divine justice.” You know I’ve found out Sid that in Amos chapter 9 I found it right there in verse 15 and it’s at the end of the covenant of sure mercy where he promises to do this for us“I will plant them in their land, no longer shall they be pulled up from the land that I have given them say’s the Lord your God.” And that comes right at the end of the covenant of sure mercy. It is an amazing thing.
