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The School of Unlearning

Steven Shelley

Steven Shelley

New Hope Revival Ministries

May 12, 2007 · 9 min read

Part 1:

This is for us. I want you to hear it. I was in a university, and it was a medical university like. The only reason why I’m saying that is because I’ve seen some pictures, some films over the years and I’ve seen this kind of a classroom.

It wasn’t a flat classroom like this. It was an elevated classroom where the chairs were elevated. I mean they weren’t bleachers, they were desks. You know, long tables and chairs. But they were like this, and the teacher was down at the bottom. What would you call that? Like an amphitheater style or something but in a nice big tall ceiling building.

And there was a little woman, kind of mousy looking. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful woman. Older woman with a little blue grey bun on the back of her head. A little bit feeble looking. But I knew she was sharp.

And she was sitting at the table, and she was the professor. She was teaching the class. And I looked around, and from floor to ceiling were these dry erase boards. All over. And there were equations like I have never seen before in my life. Like, I don’t know what it was. Like quantum physics or… I don’t know what it was. Heavy.

But oddly enough I was able to recognize portions of the equation. One board, one whole board to my left was one problem solved in an equation. One problem. And it was line after line after line after line of numbers and dots and digits and letters.

And I remembered small portions of this equation from trigonometry or from algebra or something. Looked familiar to me somehow. Little sections of it. And then there would be a line of stuff I’d never seen before. And you couldn’t have proved it by me.

But it was so fascinating that everybody in the room was saying things like, “This is awesome. This is unbelievable. Have you ever seen anything like this?” And we were madly writing. Every person had a notebook on their desk and we were madly copying these equations, this notebook with everything that we could do. And all of a sudden I looked back up to the left board and it disappeared. It went, like somebody had wiped the board clean. Now that is so strange. I looked to the front. “Whoooo.” Everything disappeared. I looked down at my notebook, and what I had been writing on this half a page, gone. I thumbed back through the pages, and everything that I had copied off the board, gone. Disappeared. Erased.

I closed the notebook. And on the cover of the notebook was the name of the class. (This is where you and I come in.) On the name of the notebook was the… You know like, give me an example. Like Biology 101.

Do you know what I’m saying? Name of the class, the number of the class, the level of the class.

Guess what my notebook said? The name of the class was, “Unlearning 711.”

Unlearning 711.

Well, my first thought is. “This is like 700 levels of unlearning.” I’m a dumb somebody if I’ve got to unlearn 700 levels of something. But that was my first reaction. But all of a sudden I was overwhelmed in this experience with the sense of Isaiah.

There was nothing on there that said Isaiah. But before I read to you Isaiah 7:11, I need to tell you one other thing that happened, that this tied in with, that I didn’t know if I would tell it or not.

I think I should tell it.

I hate to tell it, but I think I ought to because who knows? I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know what will happen this time next week. That’s how fast things are moving in the Spirit realm.

You know we were talking about people that we know that are away from God. You may come in here next Sunday and all of them be sitting here. I’m honest. There’s just no telling what is happening.

The Lord spoke to me. I started to try to soft-soap it for somebody. But the Lord spoke to me. I wasn’t praying. I had been thinking a bit earlier about the things of the Lord. But I had been praying. And He said this to me.

He spoke two things to me. He said, “I will give you a sign, and I will make you a gazing stock.”

And I said, “What, Lord?” He said, “I will give you a sign and I will make you a gazing stock.”

And this was my reaction. I said, “Oh Lord, no.” It was a strange reaction, but appropriate under the circumstances.

I just turned around in the mirror and I said, “No. Please, not a gazing stock.” Not really knowing what it meant, but it didn’t sound pretty, you know. Gazing stock.

I mean if the Lord would have said, “I’m about to exalt you and place you on a pedestal, or put you on a silver platter and serve you to the king of England, (well there’s not a king of England) the queen of England.

Oh that would have sounded nice. But He said, “I’m going to give you a sign and make you a gazing stock.” Didn’t sound so lovely.

I told my wife what the Lord had said. And I told her what my reaction was. “No.” I think my reaction caused this experience. Because here I have gone to this university of unlearning. All this stuff is disappearing off the wall. My notebook says, “Unlearning 711.” And I’m overwhelmed with a sense of Isaiah the prophet.

And this happened just the next, the same night that I told the Lord, “No, Lord. No, not that.”

Listen at what Isaiah 7:11 says in the amplified Bible. It’s almost the same in King James.

In the amplified Bible, guess what the first phrase is, “Ask for yourself a sign.”

Now I know you can make this up as you go along, if you’re that kind of a person. But I told my wife what the Lord had said. “Ask for yourself a sign, a token or proof, of the Lord your God, one that will be convincing to you that God has spoken and will keep His Word. Ask it either in the depth or in the height above. Let it be as deep as Sheol or as high as the heaven.” (Sheol is the grave.)

Part 2:

Here’s what my scripture said. Isaiah 7:11. God said the day before, “I’ll give you a sign and make you a gazing stock.”

That word “gazing stock,” you know, it come… One place in the Old Testament is used very, very negatively. But in Hebrews 10… Let’s just look at that real quick, so you’ll know what to expect. Verse 31 says, “It is a fearful and formidable thing to incur the divine penalties and be cast into the hands of a living God. But be ever mindful of the days gone by in which, after you were first spiritually enlightened, you endured a great and painful struggle.” This would be a good place for the violins to play because that’s been my life’s story. Sometimes being yourselves a gazing stock, publicly exposed to insults and abuse and distress, and sometimes claiming fellowship and making common calls with others who wre so treated.

There’s a camaraderie that comes. There’s a brotherly affection and fraternity, fraternal affection that comes by those that have been a gazing stock.

That bothered me. It really did. It still does to a certain extent. But I believe the anointing on it is saying that God’s about to do something. Folks are going to see it. Let it be for the Glory of God. If it’ll be for His Glory, it’ll be. If it’ll really be for the Glory of God, I’m ready.

Part 3:

We’re waiting to go to the university of unlearning. We’re waiting on God to help us unlearn all that we’ve learned, but we didn’t learn it the right way or we… There’s a little something that wasn’t from Him or it’s so ingrained in our minds that we think God has to come and do it exactly the same way. So God just has to kind of take it from us.

“Unlearning. 7:11.”

I threw up my hands in this experience and looked down at that little woman sitting at her desk. And I said, “Now, what are we supposed to do?” And I had a little bit of an attitude. I said, ‘”Now what are we supposed to do?” Oh, she raised up her little head, took her fingers and laced them like that and put them down on her little chest like that. She cocked her head to the side and smiled the sweetest smile. And stared at me like, “Dear…”

There was a rumbling in the class. I wasn’t the only one upset. I was just the only one that had a big enough mouth to say, “What are we going to do now?” While she’s standing there just staring at me with this big grin on her face, she just kind of nods her head towards the door like that. She just motions her head to the door and she said, “Now we will be taught by heaven’s best.” And I looked out the door. There was a glass pane, few inches wide and several feet deep, like that pane of glass there, but taller. The door was ajar a few inches. I could see both through the glass panel of the door and through the gap of the door that wasn’t closed. And I saw.

And the only way I know how to describe it was, I saw the sages and the prophets. There was something about the way they looked. Their look carried authority. There was something about their excitement, the way they were gathered, the way they were assembled, the way they were waiting for a nod, the way they were waiting for a signal, the way they were dressed, the color of their skin. Everything about them revealed to me that they were the sages and the prophets.

“We will now be taught by heaven’s best.”

When I shared that experience with these men who I believe have prophetic gifts they were just overwhelmed. They said, “This is confirmation for what God’s been saying all over the world.”