A little room to move.
I was here yesterday for the meeting in preparation for the conference, and many brothers and sisters gathered together here from several different places. I see there are a number here this morning, and it is good to be here again in the Lord’s presence and among the family at Richmond. That is a real blessing.
I want to bring you God’s love from the saints up in New York, up in that cold territory. God is at work. We are thankful that, wherever we go and drop in on the saints, there is the same Spirit and the same love for the Lord. Sometime you ought to come up and visit us in New York. You will sense the same thing. It is the same Lord among God’s people. It is a blessing to have fellowship with His people.
I would like to share this morning from the book of Hebrews. I understand that the saints of Richmond are going to do some Bible study in Hebrews, so I hope I do not either reveal too much or reveal the wrong things.
The book of Hebrews was a letter written to Jewish Christians who had been Christians for a while and were now running into some problems. They were partakers of a heavenly calling, but they were anything but perfect. This letter was written to them, and basically the whole letter does two things: it exalts and lifts up Jesus as supreme over all, and it gives us warnings as a result of the superiority of Jesus.
In Hebrews 3 and Hebrews 4, we have both a picture of Jesus high and lifted up and a warning for us to be faithful. I would like for us to read these two chapters at one time. Watch and listen, and let the Word of God affect your life. That was one of the greatest problems among these believers: they did not let the Word of God affect their lives.
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession;
He was faithful to Him that appointed Him, as also was Moses in all His house.
For He hath been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, by so much as He that built the house hath more honor than the house.
For every house is built by some one; but He that built all things is God.
And Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were afterward to be spoken;
but Christ as a Son, over His house; whose house are we, if we hold fast our boldness and the glorying of our hope firm unto the end.Wherefore, even as the Holy Spirit saith,
Today if ye shall hear His voice,
Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation,
Like as in the day of the trial in the wilderness,
Where your fathers tried Me by proving Me,
And saw My works forty years.
Wherefore I was displeased with this generation,
And said, They do always err in their heart:
But they did not know My ways;
As I sware in My wrath,
They shall not enter into My rest.
Take heed, brethren, lest haply there shall be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God:
But exhort one another day by day, so long as it is called Today; lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin:
For we are become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end:
While it is said,
Today if ye shall hear His voice,
Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.For who, when they heard, did provoke? Nay, did not all they that came out of Egypt by Moses?
And with whom was He displeased forty years? Was it not with them that sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness?
And to whom sware He that they should not enter into His rest, but to them that were disobedient?
And we see that they were not able to enter in because of unbelief.
Let us fear therefore, lest haply, a promise being left of entering into His rest, any one of you should seem to have come short of it.
For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also they: but the word of hearing did not profit them, because it was not united by faith with them that heard.
For we who have believed do enter into that rest; even as He hath said,
As I sware in My wrath,
They shall not enter into My rest:
Although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.
For He hath said somewhere of the seventh day on this wise, And God rested on the seventh day from all His works;
And in this place again,
They shall not enter into My rest.
Seeing therefore it remaineth that some should enter thereinto, and they to whom the good tidings were before preached failed to enter in because of disobedience,
He again defineth a certain day, Today, saying in David, so long a time afterward, even as hath been before said,
Today if ye shall hear His voice,
Harden not your hearts.
For if Joshua had given them rest, He would not have spoken afterward of another day.
There remaineth therefore a Sabbath rest for the people of God.
For he that hath entered into His rest hath himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.
Let us therefore give diligence to enter into that rest, that no man fall after the same example of disobedience.
For the Word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.
And there is no creature that is not manifest in His sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do.Having then a great High Priest, Who hath passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.
For we have not a High Priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but One that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need.
Shall we pray?
Father, this problem that the saints had of not hearing Your Word, we do not want to find ourselves guilty of. Therefore, we submit ourselves to the living Word of God, that we may be faithful to You in all things. Grant us Your anointing to hear what You would say to us today. In Jesus’ name, amen.
I would like to read again Hebrews 4:1-2.
Let us fear therefore, lest haply, a promise being left of entering into His rest, any one of you should seem to have come short of it.
For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also they: but the word of hearing did not profit them, because it was not united by faith with them that heard.
These Christians, to whom this letter was originally written, had fallen on hard times. Some of their brothers and sisters had been thrown into jail. Some had lost their property. They had gone through persecution that had brought hard times upon them. Yet they had not resisted unto blood, to the shedding of blood. Most of the hard times the Christians were going through were inward turmoil.
In the middle of these hard times comes this word, this promise of rest. Christians, we have a provision, and it is rest for us in hard times. But the rest we find, even in the midst of hard times, is entered into only when we hear the living Word and respond in faith.
As verse 2 says—and I like the King James better—the Word of God must be mixed with faith in order to enter into the rest. Otherwise, we remain in unrest.
Everybody wants rest, not just Christians. That is why leisure activities have taken on such a high priority today. Everybody wants to escape, recreate, rest, and get away from it all. Yet, if you have experienced these things, many times your vacation exhausts you. You come back and say, “Oh, it is so good to be back in the routine where I can rest.”
There is no escape for the wicked. However, there is a rest that is not laziness, passivity, pushing away our calling, or avoiding our responsibility. No, no. The writer says that we must diligently enter that rest.
But what is this rest? I am sure the Christians back in those days wondered also: “How can we enter rest in the midst of hard times?” The writer uses two Old Testament examples of rest to help us understand, and I would like to share these two illustrations and apply them to us.
The first illustration of the rest we need to enter is the promised land. As we read in Hebrews 3, primarily, the rest God was talking about was that He had told the children of Israel to enter the promised land—His rest.
When they entered the promised land, God promised them all kinds of restful things. “You will have rest from your enemies.” That sounds like a great deal. They would also rest from their wanderings. These people had been slaves for hundreds of years. They were promised cities they had never built, homes they had never built, crops they had not planted, and vineyards they had not cultivated. I mean, now that is rest. That is like one big holiday.
But the children of Israel did not understand that God was saying, “If you will be faithful, you will enter into My rest.” Behind the whole thing, God was looking for a resting place. It is true that, when we enter God’s rest, we rest too. But the children were primarily thinking about my rest: “If I can just get a little hunk of land, my own vine and fig tree, grow some crops, and raise kids in a stable environment, that is really rest.”
God promised them the land, but when they got to the borders, they chickened out. They did not mix faith with the promise.
Even though the spies came back with two good reports, there were chicken spies who said, “We saw cities—you would not believe the walls around those cities. They are insurmountable. Plus, we saw these giants. We were grasshoppers in our own sight compared to them.” The people began to back up, and unbelief spread like cancer through the camp. The saints figured they could not possibly go in.
God said, “Okay, then you will not go in.” Then the people changed their minds: “Oh, now we had better go in.” God said, “No good.” They wandered for forty years in unbelief, disobedience, and murmuring.
They did not believe God would provide water, even though He provided water. They did not believe God would provide food, even though He provided food. They did not believe God’s government was any good, even though He gave them His best. They did not believe they had communion with God, even though they had the tabernacle, the fire by night, and the cloud by day. It was all taken for granted. It was all murmuring and disobedience. So God swore that they would not enter His rest, and they did not.
The whole generation passed away until Joshua and Caleb, the only remnant of the former generation, brought the children into the promised land.
By application, we also have a land to enter. Everybody here who knows the Lord knows that you entered this land. It is called Christ. We had to enter by faith. We heard the promise of His salvation. We heard the promise that He died for us. Perhaps we were weary, torn, and needing rest. The more we heard the Word, the sweeter it sounded. Then somehow we mixed our faith with the promises, and we entered into the land of promise—to Christ, our house and our land.
This began for us a life of faith that we call stepping out in faith. The faith described in entering this rest is a stepping out: “Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, to you have I given it.” It is a going-out-on-the-limb kind of faith.
The folks here in Richmond have gone out on a limb concerning a place to meet. They went so far out on a limb that they almost got fought off. But they did, and God met them as they mixed the promise with faith. They have entered into a new dimension.
God has so much for us to enter into by way of promise. Aren’t the promises precious? These promises have been given to us in their yea and amen in Christ. We think of our calling, our anointing, the gifts, and the equipping of God. All these precious promises need to be stepped into by faith.
But the promises have changed in a substantial way from the old days. In the old days, you were given a promise that you would enter in, and if you did, certain things would happen. But the living Word that comes to us as promise today is a Person. We have to personify this living Word.
When Scripture says, “Do not harden your heart, but hear Him,” it is talking about recognizing by faith that Jesus is in the midst.
How did the saints enter the promised land? They needed an apostle. Joshua and Moses were considered apostles of the Old Testament. They were the ones sent and commissioned by God to bring in the people.
The beginning point of Hebrews 3 is this: we have a better Apostle in Jesus. He is the Apostle of our faith. We need to take greater heed to the words spoken to us in these final days because these words are Christ Himself.
When we receive a promise, we are not merely receiving a little promise card out of a box. We are receiving, as it were, the great Apostle, our Lord Jesus. He comes into our midst and breathes a living Word unto us. It is a very personal thing.
When Jesus shows up as the Apostle and says, “Take that land,” it is time to move. When Jesus says, “It is time for you to take your calling,” it is time to move. When Jesus says, “All in your household shall be saved,” and speaks that living Word to you, it is the Apostle standing right in front of you saying, “Put your feet on that ground. It is time to move.”
It is more than a promise taken merely from Scripture. It is the living Word Himself showing up in our midst and telling us what to do. Therefore, we must take much greater heed to it, or else we become dull. There is no escape if we neglect the One Who comes and speaks to us.
Real faith, taking a step of faith, is a scary thing. I do not know how else to put it. I do not think “scary” is even in the Bible, but faith is a scary thing.
I heard that there was some brother here who, about six weeks ago in the prayer meeting, prayed, “Lord, we need to know Your will about a place to meet in six weeks.” What a scary move that is to make. If God does not come through in six weeks, we are cooked. But, as scary as it is, it is the only way we can begin to move when God shows up in our midst and says, “I am ready to lead.”
There is also a time limit to moving. When it talks about entering rest, there are “if” clauses all over. When Jesus, the Apostle, comes into the midst and says, “You move by faith,” there is a time limit. “Today, if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”
Usually it is not a twenty-four-hour period. But when the living Word comes to us, we have so long a period of time to respond in faith and take the steps. Otherwise, it seems that the Apostle moves on and lets us spin in the wilderness for a while before that precious promise comes alive for us again.
Whether it is reaching out to people or anything else, brothers and sisters, when the Lord Jesus, as the Apostle, the great Shepherd, and the Evangelist, comes into our midst, it is time. It is time.
We must fear lest, by not obeying this Apostle in our midst, we harden our hearts and do not enter into rest, but lose our provision and promises in Christ Jesus. No matter what area we are talking about, this step has a time limit about it.
Real faith does violence to ourselves. The children of Israel crossed the Jordan River, but before they took cities and won victories, they all had to be circumcised. It does violence to our flesh. We do not like to hear it. When the Lord says it is time to move, we are never ready.
The children of Israel got so used to living in the wilderness that they began to think, “Maybe it would be easier just to live in the wilderness. I am kind of tired of manna, but it is better than getting killed by giants.” We adjust so easily to mediocrity.
The living Word comes into our midst and immediately starts doing violence to us. “So what if you get persecuted on your job? So what?” There must be, and there is, a cutting away of flesh in order for us to walk along with this Apostle. But the rest is so wonderful. You can always tell somebody who has an aura of this rest and provision from Christ: those who walk by faith.
The second example of rest is really more the stress of the writer of Hebrews. He was talking to people who had been Christians for a while. They had tasted the Word of God, the gifts of the Spirit, the things of the Spirit, and heavenly blessings. They had already entered into Christ and into a measure of that sort of rest, yet they were restless Christians.
David wrote, “Today, if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your hearts.” Why? Because, even though the children of Israel had entered the promised land, David could see that the people were not resting. There was something deeper to rest than merely having a place to be.
Rest is more than a position; it is a relationship.
When the children of Israel got into the promised land, everybody forgot about finding God a resting place. God had said, “Find Me the city that I choose and set up a place where I can be worshiped.” Everybody forgot until David came along. The first thing he did when he became king was to get Jerusalem. “That is God’s resting place. I cannot rest until God rests.”
David rested more than anybody else because he found God a resting place. God gave him rest. David saw that rest was not merely external; rest is an inner relationship.
In Hebrews 4, the writer calls this Sabbath rest.
There remaineth therefore a Sabbath rest for the people of God.
For he that hath entered into His rest hath himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.
The first rest was the rest of entering the promised land. Now he is talking about Sabbath rest. He goes back to the origin of Sabbath rest: on the seventh day God rested from all His works, and from the foundation of the world His works were finished.
God rests. He is in a relationship with Himself, with the world, and with all things around Him that is one of rest. We know that Scripture also says God works. Jesus said, “My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” So God works, but He rests. How does He do that?
I can say two things I have seen about God’s resting while He works. First, God can rest even when He works because He is always true to Himself. Whatever He does, He does out of Who He is. He is holy, He is love, and He is righteous. Everything He does flows out of Who He is.
We get out of rest because we do things that are not ourselves. It is our old man or some other thing, and it jars us. But God always flows out of Who He really is. Even when we are unfaithful, God remains faithful. He cannot deny Himself. There is rest in flowing out from yourself when you really are who you are.
Second, God rests because He sets things in motion in such a way that He sees the beginning and the end. Everything God does has in view both the beginning and the end. As Isaiah says, He declares the end from the beginning. Everything is done according to purpose.
That is why Romans 8:28 always slides into our prayers. Everything we give to God—problems, circumstances, trials, and difficulties—He puts into that flow toward His end: conforming us to the image of Christ and bringing many brethren along with the Son Who is already exalted. Everything moves toward God’s purpose.
One reason God can work and rest at the same time is that everything He does simply moves toward His end.
The Lord Jesus, especially in the Gospel of John, always had the end in view. Jesus knew from the beginning that Judas would betray Him. He knew that He had come from the Father and was going back to the Father, and that all things had been given into His hands. Then He arose and washed the disciples’ feet. What He did flowed right toward the end purpose that He had.
Paul also had the end in view. He believed the Lord was coming back at any time. So everything he did on any given day was a reflection of what could be the last day he would be able to work. “I do not know if there will be a tomorrow, so I serve You all I can today, and I leave all the results to You.”
Paul learned to work and yet work without striving, because he flowed with what God was doing. He moved toward the end of what God was doing. After a while, Paul probably did not do much that did not have God’s end in mind.
We do all kinds of things—some good and moving toward God’s end, and some with no purpose at all, just random wanderings and workings. No wonder we exhaust ourselves so quickly. Responsible brothers in any fellowship have got to learn this lesson: if we do not work with the end in view, we will totally exhaust ourselves and end up getting nowhere. We become janitors for the local fellowship and provide no vision, wisdom, or ministry.
When I prepare a message, the struggle is to know where to begin and what the end is. Once I get the beginning and the end, the rest is sort of fun. The real work is, “God, what do You want to say?” Once I feel I know what God wants to say, the rest begins to come out.
Sometimes, when somebody knows they are going to die and gets past the shock and fear of death, their lives have a sweetness of priority. Everything they do is meaningful. They spend time with their children, their family, and the saints. They stop picking on people and just love them.
It is too bad all of us do not know we are going to die very soon. It is too bad we do not all see that Christ may come tomorrow, so we must do the highest things today. If we only had that end always in sight.
Instead, we believe we are stuck in a routine that goes on eternally. We are caught in a humdrum, hamster-wheel existence where we paddle and paddle and go nowhere. Then we get exhausted because we have no sense of what the end is.
The writer says that we who enter His rest cease from our works. He does not mean that we become lazy and stop serving God. He is talking about dead works. There is so much chaff in our lives. We expend so much energy trying to accomplish things that are absolutely nothing. We are building barns and doing all kinds of things that, two years from now, we will see were totally futile activities.
If we could only see the end from the beginning! It is impossible to do by ourselves, but Scripture says we can enter into this Sabbath rest if we have a Leader.
The way we enter into the promised-land type of rest is through the Apostle. But the only way we enter into Sabbath rest is when we have the High Priest leading us. We must see Jesus as the High Priest.
We may have a vague vision of Jesus as High Priest because we have felt His forgiveness and His intercession. But the writer is saying, “You have been Christians a long time. You know Jesus as your Captain, Apostle, and Leader, but do you know Him in this intimate relationship as your High Priest? Do you come to Him for everything? Do you boldly go before His throne of grace in time of need?”
Most of us are not at rest with our God. We think we have to try a little harder so that God will like us. Or we think, “God is so far up there. How could He care about my problem at my job, my family problem, or my emotional problem?”
One of the major themes in Hebrews is that Jesus is our High Priest. Jesus became a human being so He could understand us and be our High Priest. Christians sometimes exalt Jesus so highly that they forget they can talk to Him about anything. We must always have reverence before the Lord, but we must also be truthful with Him.
He is our High Priest, and He understands. He has been through everything we have been through, except that He has not sinned.
This understanding of the High Priest and the necessity of hearing the living Word come together in Hebrews 4. We enter into rest by letting the Word of God be living and active in us—cutting inside us and dividing soul and spirit. When the Word comes to us, not as a call to purchase a building or witness to somebody, but to sanctify us and bring us into our crucifixion with Christ and our new life in Him, we sometimes think that we are no longer loved by God.
The writer of Hebrews had to say, “You are being disciplined by God right now, but it is because He loves you that He disciplines you.” When He comes with a searching Word that begins to divide you inside, it is the High Priest at work inside you. So draw near to Him.
You must exercise faith. But the faith of Hebrews 3 and Hebrews 4 is not only a stepping-out kind of faith. It is also called holding fast. It is trust. It is abiding in that Word.
But Christ as a Son, over His house; whose house are we, if we hold fast our boldness and the glorying of our hope firm unto the end. — Hebrews 3:6
For we are become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end. — Hebrews 3:14
Having then a great High Priest, Who hath passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. — Hebrews 4:14
It is one thing to enter into Christ; it is another thing to abide in Christ. It was one thing for the children of Israel to enter the land, cross the Jordan, and defeat a few enemies. It was another thing to live faithfully in the land.
They did not know how to abide in the land. They compromised, fell into idolatry, and began fighting with one another. They did not know how to abide in the land in peace. It was God’s rest, and it was to be their rest, but they fought one another in intertribal wars, and everybody did what was right in his own eyes.
They could see beating up on the Canaanites, Perizzites, Jebusites, parasites, termites, and whatever else there was. But how about the nice-ites? Those are a different tribe. The nice-ites are the tribes of nice people. Do we beat up on them too? Maybe we should not. We do not know how we are really supposed to abide in the land.
Paul says that he is crucified to the world and the world is crucified to him. That is how he rests in the land. But we are always being pulled. The Gibeonites, whom the children of Israel allowed to live, brought idols and led to idolatry. We think these little tribes of the world that tempt us are really nothing, but in the end they cause idolatry in our lives.
We are not at rest in our relationship with the world. We are Christians, but we are not really at rest because we have not been crucified to the world, and the world crucifies us. It is tough.
We are also not at rest with ourselves. How many Christians are desperately dissatisfied? “I hate myself. I know I am no good. I have no ministry. God does not like me. People do not like me. I am a nerd.” They are totally dissatisfied and restless.
Some people show their restlessness by bouncing from fellowship to fellowship. They never find a perfect place where they can rest because rest is a relationship. Something inside has to happen—a relationship to ourselves.
The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. We have to know ourselves. The writer says, “Be careful that you do not have an evil, unbelieving heart.” You may say you are a Christian dwelling in the land, but abiding in rest is abiding in a relationship with God in such a way that you are resting with regard to yourself, the world, and the other saints.
We need one another’s help. “Encourage one another day by day, as long as it is called Today.” We need one another to keep the High Priest before us and to keep the sense of His Word working on us and sanctifying us.
When I hear a real living Word, it is so sweet to me when somebody ministers something right to my heart, and then it tears me up for days. Does that happen to you? It goes in sweet, and then it tears me up. My heart dissolves and becomes confused because there is a work of division going on in my life.
The Word came in. Now I need to hold fast to that Word and hold fast to my High Priest. I need to say to Jesus, “I will not let You go until I am through this thing,” and not fall away from the living God.
There is another key phrase in Hebrews: the living God. Jesus is so alive, but sometimes He seems so dead to us because we do not allow the Word of God to penetrate, move in, and do its sanctifying, high-priestly work.
Just as surely as when promises come to us to enter a certain land or take a certain provision, we need to see our Apostle, the Lord Jesus Christ, standing before us as the Captain of the host. In the same way, when the Word begins to divide and God is dealing on the inside to bring us into a place of rest, we need to see Jesus the High Priest standing there, interceding for us and taking us by the hand into the Father’s presence, where we can worship and live with Him.
It is wonderful to be in Christ. But even more precious is not only to be in Christ, but to have Christ in you as your hope of glory—to have Christ in you, perfecting you in rest and diligently working through the Word of God, so that even in tough times we have security because of our relationship to Christ.
You cannot buy that relationship for all the good times in the world. You cannot buy that rest through all the compromise in the world.
There is a counterfeit rest: letting our ears become dull to hearing the Word of God, drifting away from the Word to which we should take heed. We get duller and duller in hearing and begin to misinterpret that as rest. Yet all the time we may simply be living carnal lives, and God is not working within us.
We may feel as though we are resting, but it is not rest. It is sleep.
When the Word is alive and God is the living God before us, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But we grow dull because we have heard it so many times before. We do not see Jesus the High Priest standing before us with a living Word for us this time.
We become so familiar with the Word of God that we do not even read it anymore. “Oh, I know it. I think I will meditate on the Word of God today. John 3. Amen.” We grow so familiar with the Word that we do not let it address us or deal with us anymore. We become hardened to the promises and hardened to the dealings.
The writer says that somebody who begins to trample the Word of God underfoot and crucify Christ again has no place of repentance. We can become so hard that the Word rolls off our backs with no effect anymore. We may think we are resting, but we are deceived and on the edge of real danger.
The writer of Hebrews is saying that today is a day of tough times, but there is rest for us. It is to know the Apostle and High Priest of our confession and to press into Him.
When He tells you to take a step in that aggressive faith, with Him standing before us, it is time to step. There is only a certain amount of time you have. When the Word is dealing within us, let it have its effect in us, and we will learn how to rest through the High Priest.
We are to draw boldly before the throne of grace to find mercy and receive grace to help in time of need.
I do not know if that is where you are at, but that is where we are at up in New York: in some tough times. We are not fooled by outward success. Some fellowships are growing quite a bit numerically, but we are not fooled. We are in tough times, and we want to keep the end in view.
We do not know how long we have to enjoy these superabundant blessings of God’s grace that we have right now. We cannot waste them. We need to press into Christ, our Apostle and High Priest. This is the living Word, which can either roll off our backs or do its work and bring us into rest.
Lord, we want the rest. But we know it is as we enter Your rest—You Who have ceased from all work and Who have known the end from the beginning.
O Lord, we want to be Yours and to press into You more than we have ever seen before. But when the Word of God works on us, we sometimes forget that it is You. It is the last Word spoken in the last days. It is that Word to which we need to pay the more earnest attention.
O Lord, forgive us for taking Your precious Word so lightly and for not seeing through the Word to Your living presence. Grant that for us, Your children, the Word may be You. Amen.
Grant that, as we hear this Word, we may have the confidence to hold fast and to step forward.
O Lord, in this day, even the brothers and sisters here have entered into a new meeting place. You have obviously told them to step, and You moved before them as the great Apostle of our confession. We praise and glorify Your name.
Although others may not have seen it, we saw the Captain of the host standing before us, saying, “Move forward.” We want to stand regarding the money that is needed, believing that when You move, none can stay Your hand.
Precious Apostle of our faith, how You move—with such power, such grace, and such enabling. O Lord, do not let us get external. Do not let us merely see the outside place and say, “Now we can rest.” Rather, Lord, let us enter into that full and complete rest of relationship to You.
Lord, we thank You that You are the Author of our faith. We trust You to be the Finisher. We bless Your name, Lord Jesus. Amen.