I not only see a lot of new faces; I see a new place. This is a new place, as far as I’m concerned, and this is my first time visiting with you here. I think this is a little better, the way it is set up, and I give glory to God. Just coming on the grounds, I can see that God has really done something—taking a house and opening it up in this way so we could meet for worship. It is obvious. I think it is a testimony to God, to what He is doing.
I would also like to testify for just a moment before I sing, thanking you for being faithful and having the conference every year. A lot of things happen. I do not know if you get to hear about them. I will just mention a few offshoots from the conference.
There was one teenage girl, about fourteen years old, a little blonde-haired girl, and she came to the Lord while she was at the conference. She was from Florida. She came up alone—that is, without her parents—and when she went back home, as a result of her coming to the Lord, her dad came to the Lord. Her mom was a sort of backslidden Christian; she came to the Lord. They have been incorporated into the fellowship in Port Charlotte now, and they are all rejoicing.
There was increase out of that. I guess the life of this girl got home so bubbly that it had a witness effect on her dad, who had never been interested in this stuff before. But he came to hear what was going on, and when he came, the Lord caught him. He was soundly saved right there, and so we thank God for that.
There were four responsible brothers in a fellowship on Long Island called East Meadow. Two of them came to the conference with their wives. They were so convicted about the end time and the need to get serious. When they went home, they had a burden on their hearts that the fellowship could not continue to meet on a sort of humdrum, routine, low-life basis.
When they shared it with the other two brothers who had not attended the conference, it turned out that the burden was upon all four, quite independently and sovereignly. They came before the saints, stopped all the meetings, and said, “We need to talk business. We are not pleasing to the Lord the way we are living. We just want you to know that. We feel like God needs to help us to repent and to be real, or else to stop faking.”
Well, it had such an electric effect in that fellowship. I cannot explain to you what happened, but would you not know, in the coincidental arrangement of God, that very week Lance was coming to Long Island to share on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, preparing for the last time sort of what he shared here in Richmond.
We were just flabbergasted at what God did during those three days. There is also an offshoot from the conference. We had rented—or were trying to rent—a little building that held about two hundred people. It was like a Holiday Inn, one of their rooms. By the time I got home from the conference, one week before Lance was to come, that deal fell through. We had no place to meet.
We figured two hundred people would come, so we had to find a place. The only place we could find that could accommodate that number was a huge evangelical free church that was going bankrupt. It held seven hundred. They had one hundred saints, and they believed God would give them seven hundred, so they built a huge thing. It did not work out, so they were open to anybody renting their building.
We rented it for those three nights. It is a good thing we did. Six hundred people came from Long Island. We have never had such a gathering of Christians like that on Long Island since I have been there in five years. God just moved in a sovereign way.
I know two or three hundred people were people with whom we had no direct relationship in fellowships. They were just saints from here and there, and God moved them all together. It was a tremendous time. Of course, the atmosphere was electric as Lance shared, as only he can share, on the end time, Lebanon, and Israel. I mean, it had us all stirred up. But God moved on Long Island in a wonderful way, and I think part of it was the catalyst and overflow of what was happening here. So I was thankfully gone.
I would like to sing two songs by myself in worship of the Lord. Then I would like for us to sing a song together called “Give Us Vision,” a little chorus. I will sing the first verse so you can understand what it is. It is a very simple chorus, and all you do is put in different words each verse—whatever word comes to your heart.
I am going to sing, “Give us vision of the beauty of the Lord,” and then together we will sing the next verse, “Give us vision of the glory of the Lord,” and so on. You will see; it is very simple.
The speaker sings worship songs, including the chorus:
Give us vision of the beauty of the Lord;
Open up our eyes to behold the beauty of the Lord.Give us vision of the glory of the Lord;
Open up our eyes to behold the glory of the Lord.Give us vision of the joy of His yearning for His bride.
Open our eyes to behold the Lord upon His throne.
Open our eyes to behold the Lord who is coming soon.
We have seen, Lord, that as You change the courses of history, You open up the heavens and reveal Your glorious enthronement. You reveal in a fresh way Your soon coming. We want to see these things afresh. We want to be captured by vision that, in turn, can motivate and enable us to embrace the cross with joy and do Your will on earth as it is in heaven.
So we give this time to You now, asking, “Thy will be done.” Lord, give us anointing to hear, to receive, and to respond to You in living faith. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Well, God is certainly moving in this day. I think you are aware of that here. We are aware of that in New York, and in many places.
I have felt a burden for the body of Christ in a larger way than just here locally. As I have visited different fellowships and seen the saints in different places, a burden has come up in my heart that I want to share with you today. I hope it is timely for all of you.
There is a question in the Scriptures, in the book of Jeremiah, that is such an important question that I want to exhort you, by the grace of God, always to be faithful to ask this question. It is crucial to our life, to our fruitfulness, to our anointing, and to our blessing. Unless we ask this question, we cannot go on for very long.
This single question is such a strategic question that, once it gets answered, it answers a lot of other questions. It is a question that should always be asked by the grace of God, no matter how things seem externally. It is also a costly question. When you ask this question, your job is in jeopardy. Your ease is in jeopardy.
In Jeremiah, we find that the problem with Israel—the thing Jeremiah is burdened about—is that they did not ask the question anymore. Turn to Jeremiah 2, and you will see the question.
The question is four words:
Where is the Lord?
Beginning in Jeremiah 2:4:
Hear ye the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob,
and all the families of the house of Israel:
Thus saith the Lord,
What unrighteousness have your fathers found in Me,
that they are gone far from Me,
and have walked after vanity, and are become vain?Neither said they, Where is the Lord
that brought us up out of the land of Egypt,
that led us through the wilderness,
through a land of deserts and of pits,
through a land of drought and of the shadow of death,
through a land that none passed through,
and where no man dwelt?And I brought you into a plentiful land,
to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof;
but when ye entered, ye defiled My land,
and made Mine heritage an abomination.The priests said not, Where is the Lord?
and they that handle the law knew Me not:
the rulers also transgressed against Me,
and the prophets prophesied by Baal,
and walked after things that do not profit.Therefore I will yet contend with you, saith the Lord,
and with your children’s children will I contend.For pass over the isles of Kittim, and see;
and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently;
and see if there hath been such a thing.
Hath a nation changed its gods, which yet are no gods?
but My people have changed their glory
for that which doth not profit.Be ye astonished, O ye heavens, at this,
and be horribly afraid;
be ye very desolate, saith the Lord.
For My people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
and hewed them out cisterns,
broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
“Where is the Lord?” Now, this is not a geographical question. Mary Magdalene asked where the body of our Lord was at the tomb. We are not doing that. This is not a cosmological or theological argument: “Where is the Lord? Is He on earth, or is He up in heaven?” He is both places.
This is not a soteriological question having to do with our salvation: “Where is the Lord? Does He live in us when we are saved?” Yes, He certainly does. This is a spiritual, practical question—or a practical, spiritual question, because it is the same either way.
Where is the Lord? This question assumes that God is alive, that God is moving, that God is working, and that God has goals and purposes which He is fulfilling. Well, what is He doing right now? Is He hiding? Is He pouring Himself out? Is He fighting? Is He resting? Is He withholding? Is He blessing?
Where is the Lord in the practical sense of the issues of our Christian experience and fellowship together? Where is the Lord? There is the question.
You can see, now that you know the question, the vitality of what I said before—the importance of this question that has directly to do with our life, our anointing, and our blessing. If we do not ask the question, we cannot go on very long without getting off in some side stream somewhere.
It is a question that, once we get the answer to it, answers a lot of other questions, such as, “Where should I be?” We ask that question much more often than we ask the question, “Where is the Lord?” or, “Where does He want me to be?” But if the first question could be answered, it would answer a lot of other questions.
It is a question that should be asked at any time. The problem is that in times of movement, blessing, and prosperity, the question does not get asked. It is assumed: “Why, the Lord is with us.” That is what they were assuming when Jeremiah spoke these words.
It is a costly question, because when you ask, “Where is the Lord?” it is not often an answer that we want to hear in relationship to ourselves.
There is also one other reason why the question is vital. This question is referred to in the Psalms. Do you know that not only do believers sense if the Lord seems to be missing somehow, but unbelievers sense it? David, in Psalm 42, says, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee,” while his enemy all the time cajoles him, saying, “Where is thy God?”
Even unbelievers mock us, and sometimes we do not know. This is a crucial question: Where is the Lord?
Now, when we read this passage in Jeremiah, we see that there were several groups of people who had stopped asking the question. The people as a whole had stopped asking it, and he especially refers to certain people who had stopped asking the question. Down in Jeremiah 2:8, he says, “The priests said not, Where is the Lord?”
First of all, look at Jeremiah 2:13, because the prophetic point Jeremiah is making is that God’s people committed two evils. They forsook Him, the fountain of living waters, and secondly, they hewed themselves out broken cisterns that could hold no water.
The first thing they did was forsake the Lord. Now, you never could have gotten anybody in Israel to admit that they had forsaken the Lord, but they had.
The priests did not say, “Where is the Lord?” The priests were involved with worship and sacrifice. Should not the worshippers be the first ones to sense that the Lord is missing? But the priests loved the system of worship they had and had fallen in love with the intricacies and aesthetics of the whole thing.
By the time Jeremiah wrote, they had developed such a system of worship that you would not believe it. It was beautiful: trumpets blowing, lutes playing, choirs singing antiphonally back and forth. The priests did not just put the sacrifice on the altar; they sliced it up a certain way. They were like those Japanese guys in the restaurant. They probably flipped their knives and hacked everything up, put it on the fire. They had it down. It was an art. It was an art form.
But sometimes maybe God was not there. Who notices that when we are so busy flipping knives and throwing salt and pepper around, cutting up the sacrifice, wearing special garments, and all that sort of thing? It is possible for worshippers to get lost in the love of the aesthetics of the whole thing and miss the fact that the Lord is just not there.
That does not only apply to high-liturgy people in the church. It applies to us. We get so grooved in on songs that we know the next song that is coming. Sometimes we can sing through the whole thing and realize that our mind has been totally away the whole time. Where was the Lord for us that day?
The priests did not ask, “Where is the Lord?” Would to God today that the spiritual intercessors of the nation could ask that question. They just did not think of it. They were too busy.
The next group: “They that handle the law knew Me not”—the teachers. You would think certainly the ministry of the Word, and not only the teachers but the prophets, would sense, “Wait a minute, there is something severely wrong here.” But no. They had gotten into such a system. They were teaching doctrine and spilling out words. They were in love with the knowledge of the truth.
It says, “They did not know Me.” But they knew doctrine. I do not know if you have ever read any of the Talmud; it is a very boring book. But one thing about the Talmud that is interesting is to see how two rabbis can take a simple statement, like “Keep the Sabbath day holy,” and run that thing around in circles until you have forgotten what the initial statement was.
They run off this way and run off that way. They dissect words, reinterpret, spiritualize, allegorize, and come back to a different conclusion than the thing really means. So far had they gone from the basic spirit of the Old Testament that when Jesus came and simply spoke what the actual words meant in the Old Testament, it raised a scandal.
The people were in love with knowledge, dogma, and doctrine. The rabbis were esteemed teachers, and it went to their heads. They all had PhDs. Even today among Judaism, if a rabbi does not have a PhD, he is considered a scoundrel or a lay rabbi. You have got to be learned.
Among us also, we can get so locked into doctrines and things that we fail to ask, “Where is the Lord in the whole thing?” We get principled to death. Sometimes we take principles and do not allow life. We need to be careful of that. We get trapped. Next thing you know, where is the Lord?
We have our things set up according to principles. Well, fine and good, but sometimes we are not allowing God to slip in there. Just when you think you have God in a box according to your principles, He is going to do something different. Is that not the way He does it? Just when you say, “Now we have the worship service set up this way,” somebody who does not know any better comes in and speaks life, but it is not in the way we usually think.
I am just saying principles are there because they are the way God moves, but we have to be careful. They had the law down. If you were not a rabbi, you just did not speak up in the synagogue and ask a question if you valued your life, because the rabbis would chew you to bits.
Only Jesus, a twelve-year-old boy, could stand in the temple and confound the wisdom of the wise, because He knew where His Father was. So He knew He had to be about the Father’s business. He always knew where His Father was.
“The rulers also transgressed against Me.” The Hebrew word for “rulers” there in Jeremiah 2:8 is the word shepherds. The shepherds have transgressed against Me.
Originally, being a king—if you cast it in the mold of David—was to be a shepherd. David had a ministry as king. He sought the Lord. He had a shepherd’s heart. He counseled with people. It was not a position; it was a ministry.
But by the time you got to these fellows, Josiah and Jehoiakim and these kind of guys, being a king was a job, not a ministry. No longer being a shepherd was a ministry; it was an authoritarian position. These kings huffed and puffed with such arrogance and pride that it left the spirit of servanthood completely out of being a king.
Now you got served; you did not serve. But in David’s day, he was a servant. By the time they came to Rehoboam—just two generations after David—when Rehoboam came to the throne, he said, “Solomon may have beaten you with whips, but I am going to beat you with scorpions.”
Solomon was a great man of God, and he had authority. But this little wise guy comes along and thinks he is going to make everybody afraid of him. Well, you know what he did? He split the nation of Israel right in two, because they said, “We are not listening to this little whip-snapper. Let us go back to our homes and see what this guy can do.”
Of course, Rehoboam could do nothing, and Jeroboam took over the northern kingdom. But the kings had forgotten that the Lord is only in their kingship as long as they are shepherds serving. They lost that along the way. Now they were lording it over people, making decisions: “This is my job. I deserve better for my job.” So they looted the people, basically.
Jeremiah also has a personal word about the prophets, who prophesied by Baal, because they had lost the inspiration of really hearing from God and submitting to the Word of God. The prophets had to come up with something. They were professional prophets.
There is nothing harder than to be considered a minister, because people always think you can crank out God’s Word. If a person is not really scared of that and before the Lord, sooner or later they start cranking out sausages, but it is not from God.
These prophets had to hypothesize. When it came time to prophesy, they stood in the temple and said, “Thus saith the Lord,” but they were prophesying by another spirit. They were using psychic understanding, perhaps soul power, and the knowledge of what people wanted to hear. Who knows? It was some sort of extra-human power that they were under the influence of, but it was not the Lord.
They had forsaken God. Of course, the people as a whole had forsaken God too, and yet they were God’s people. You can see what happens when you forsake God. Do you know what always happens? You get really busy.
It is the safest way to conceal the fact that we have lost our roots and our mooring. So they decided they needed to build cisterns. Now, this is not the opposite of brethren. Cisterns are when you dig a hole in the ground to store water. They chip that out of rock most of the time and store water in cisterns.
They decided, “We have got to build these cisterns,” and they built cisterns that were cracked and could not hold water. But boy, were they busy. They were so busy.
Look at Jeremiah 7:21 to see how busy the priests were. My, my, they were busy. This is the Lord’s comment about their sword-swinging, Japanese-restaurant, ritualistic worship and sacrificial system.
Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel,
Add your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices, and eat ye flesh.
For I spake not unto your fathers,
nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt,
concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices:
but this thing commanded I them, saying,
Obey My voice, and I will be your God,
and ye shall be My people.
God says, “I did not speak to your fathers or command them in the day that I brought them out of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. I said, ‘Obey My voice.’” Not flub it all the time and just offer Me sacrifices. The basic spirit of the commandment is, “Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be My people.”
Do you expect Me to hang around just because you offer Me pleasant-smelling smoke? I want obedience. “I will be your God; you shall be My people, if you obey My voice.” There is a cost to hearing God and knowing where He is. What is that cost? It is obvious there: obedience.
The priests were busy devising their ritualistic systems. In other portions of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and elsewhere, we read how the teachers devised traditions of men which sounded all good but denied the power and reality of God. So on they went, building cisterns.
I know this gets preached almost every other week, but the busyness of God’s people is absolutely phenomenal. We need to have the life of Christ and do the will of God, and it seems like a lot of busyness. But there is a difference between a swarm of bees actually building what they are supposed to build—a hive—and just a bunch of flies spinning around doing nothing.
Sometimes when the saints are buzzing around, they sound more like flies buzzing than bees accomplishing purpose according to the will of God. What is the question? “Where is the Lord?”
How do we know where the Lord is? There is another question that goes along with knowing where the Lord is. There are two coordinates, sort of, that you have to plot to know where the Lord is. We need not only ask, “Where is the Lord?” We need to ask the second question: What time is it?
The Lord moves, and you need to know what time it is to know how He is moving. The Lord always moves according to time. So we have a space-time continuum. There are two points that have to be charted. We need to know what time it is, because we cannot know where the Lord is unless we know what time it is, and we cannot know what time it is unless we know where the Lord is. It is a paradox. We have got to know both.
Jesus, our Lord Jesus—praise His holy name—always knew what time it was. Have you ever noticed that in the Bible? He always knew. He could say to His own mother, “Mine hour is not yet come.” He said to His brothers, when they tried to get Him to go to the Feast of Tabernacles, “My time is not yet come.”
But He said to the woman at the well in Samaria, “The hour cometh, and now is.” He knew exactly. His internal spiritual watch told Him what was going on.
In John 9, when He healed the man who was born blind, He said, “I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” He knew the dusk was setting in. He knew the time.
In John 12, He said, “The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.” He always knew what time it was. It is incredible. Not only that, but He always knew where His Father was. He said, “My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” That makes sense. “I must be in My Father’s house.”
We have got to know what time it is. It is not enough to know philosophically, like Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for everything under the sun: a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to pull up. That is great. We can all say, “Oh yeah, there are times and seasons.”
But what time is it now for us—for you personally, or for us corporately? What time is it now? “Let’s see, I think it is time to harvest.” “No, maybe it is time to sow.” “Wait, we should plow first.” “Well, should we add water?” But there is a time in God. What time is it?
The Bible is full of timings. The Bible says these are perilous times. Some folks do not even have “peril” on their watch. Everything is getting better and better according to their watch. Well, that does not line up with God’s kingdom watch.
These are perilous times. Hebrews 4 says that sometimes it is a time of need, and we go to the throne of grace to find grace and mercy to help in a time of need. Sometimes that is what time it is.
Sometimes it is seasons of refreshing from Acts 3—“seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.” Blessed is the saint, the brother in leadership, or the simple child who knows what time it is.
God does not want us to move in mysterious ways with our fingers crossed, hoping that this time we got the timing right. Paul says in Ephesians 5, “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee.” Then he says, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” Then he says, “Be not unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”
The presupposition is that we can know perfectly well what time it is. We need to check our watch against what seems to be going on. There is a time.
The tragedy recorded in the Gospel of Luke is that Jesus came down for His so-called triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When He got to the top of the hill and looked at Jerusalem, He started to cry.
His disciples must have immediately thought, “Gee, I wonder why He is crying. Maybe He is sad about leaving His mother. Maybe He is sad about the sins of the people. Maybe He is sad because He knows He is going to die.” What was He crying about?
Jesus said, “The thing that bothers Me even more than the overt sin in Jerusalem, even more than the idolatry going on right in the city of God, the thing that exercises My soul the most and causes Me to weep is this: You did not know the time of your visitation.”
Do you remember that? Jesus said, “I wish I could come to you like a hen and put you under My wings, but you would have nothing to do with Me. So I say to you that destruction will come, and all these stones will be knocked down off the temple. There will not be one stone left upon another.”
Then He says, not, “Because you have sinned a lot,” but, “Because you did not know the time of your visitation.” This is it, folks. You stood next to the Messiah, eyeball to eyeball, and you never knew He was the Messiah. That is the unforgivable part of it. This is the most grievous thing.
It is one thing to be a hypocritical Pharisee. It is another thing to be so blind that you hear the Messiah speaking truth and living, radiating the glory of God, and do not see it. “You did not know what time it was,” Jesus said. Jerusalem is under the curse and will be destroyed.
Is that not the same flavor you sometimes get when you read the book of Revelation? Jesus looks down over these testimonies and says, “You do not understand what time it is. You folks are there, and they ought to see it. You do not even understand. You think you are going on just fine, rich and prosperous, and everything is going nice. You do not understand: I am outside, knocking on the door of this church.”
You just are not with it. You do not know what is going on. This is the voice of our Lord, who knows what time it is and is aware of the fact that the saints—even the church—can be unaware.
What time is it? How can we know where the Lord is? What time is it? These are really costly questions. They are not asked to make you feel heavy or make you feel as though no matter what you do, it is always wrong.
Maybe you can ask the Lord what time it is in your life, and you know exactly what time it is. Praise God. He wants to share that. Maybe you say, “Where is the Lord?” and ask the Lord the question, and He tells you exactly. But we still need to ask the question.
Our problem is that when we are running on in prosperity, we do not realize that the external is not always an indicator of what time it is or where the Lord is. Is that not true?
There was a point in the life of Israel where they were moving on. They were going to go into the promised land, and they thought everything was great. But when Moses went up to check with God, God said, “I am sending an angel in with those people, but I will not even go in with them. They are such a rebellious people.” Do you remember that in Exodus 33?
The people thought, “It is great. We are moving. We are prospering. We are going along.” God said, “I am not even going to go with them. I am sending an angel.” Moses intervened and interceded, and God said, “Okay, I will go.” The people were totally oblivious to the feelings of God.
There was a time in the wilderness when they lusted and lusted and lusted after meat, and they finally got their meat. They thought everything was great. But God says they lusted in their hearts, so He gave them the desires of their heart, and leanness came to their soul. A destructive waste came.
They wanted meat so badly, God gave them meat, and they said, “Praise God, now we have meat.” But meat was the means of their destruction. Sometimes the external does not always indicate what is really going on.
Poor old Daniel prayed and prayed and prayed, thought he was getting nowhere, and thought maybe God had forgotten him. But when the archangel finally got there, he said, “No, Daniel, from the first time you prayed, I heard you. It just took me a couple of weeks to get here and fight my way through.”
Sometimes when we do not sense the answer coming immediately, that does not mean we are out of God’s will, or that God is absent. He may be right there with us. Is that not possible?
Sometimes God is right there with us, and we are absolutely surrounded by the enemy. God put us there. He just has to show us the chariots of angels that are ready to defeat the foe.
Our problem is that we tend, as the people did in the Old Testament and made a sorry mistake, to go by externals as an indicator of whether God is with us or not. But that does not always work.
Many times, we are really finding and knowing God and touching Him in wonderful ways in moments when we are in serious trial, real deprivation, and a real time of trying—yet God is certainly with us.
By the same token, there are times when we feel as if everything is just moving on and coming up roses, and the fact of the matter is that God has pulled His hands back from it and said, “Look, I will just let them go until they run out of steam, because they are just off base.”
How can we know, “Where is the Lord?” I hope all of you corporately will do this, but individually I have a greater burden to share here this morning: that we as individuals must ask, “Where is the Lord in my life? What time is it in my life?”
If we ask that question, I believe God will surely show us. He says, “I have plans for you, plans of welfare and prosperity, and you shall seek Me and you shall find Me when you seek for Me with all your heart. I will be found of you.” God wants you to know exactly where He is.
There has got to be some change. I mentioned already obedience. Let us look at John 12, another angle on obedience just for a moment, because it is really the key.
If any man serve Me, let him follow Me;
and where I am, there shall also My servant be:
if any man serve Me, him will the Father honour.
Simply stated, He says, “Where I am, My servant will be if he follows Me.” Following the Lord is a very general phrase that we use, but it is incredibly practical, and it can seem incredibly elusive to us at times.
Our responsibility as servants of God is to really seek God and follow Jesus closely. He is, in fact, moving today. Are we moving right with Him, or has He left and gone another way? We need to be close to Him so we can follow Him.
When we follow the Lord, many times He will tell us to go to places and lead us to places that are not popular with us. You know this is costly. You know that following involves the cross. You know that following is not to your liking.
That is why so many people wander. Things go wrong in life, in the church, and everywhere, and people are prone to wander. There are two problems, and they are out the door looking for somewhere else. What is that? There is a wanderlust in us. Where is the Lord in that?
We have got to get to the place where we are so radical on that that we do not do what we want to do; we do what God is telling us. We follow the Lord. It has so many ramifications.
As an analogy for how to know where the Lord is, we need to do what Jesus did on frequent occasions, as recorded in Scripture: He arose early in the morning, went up on the mountain, and prayed.
It may sound oversimple, but really it is not. If we want to know where the Lord is, the first thing we need to do is wake up and realize the Lord is not static. The Lord does not commit Himself in such a way that, regardless of what we are doing in obedience or disobedience, He is just going to be there.
Sometimes we get locked into such a predestinarian view of things that we leave out human volition, the necessity for human commitment, and human decision. But we are always going to swing on this paradox. We cannot just say, “Ah, well, God is with us. God committed Himself to us through Jesus. That is it. We have a problem; God will work it out. I have no responsibility. I am swallowed up in God.”
Well, you know that is not true. Yes, God has everything predestined. Yes, God is working things out according to His purpose. But yes, you and I have human responsibility. Unless we wake up and realize it, we are already falling behind.
I am concerned on a personal basis, and for the larger body of Christ, to see so many brothers and sisters who have been Christians for such a long period of time and have never sensed their own personal calling in life.
In some fellowships, I know, the corporate calling is clearer than the individual calling, and they are stuck. Individually, they are not responding in personal obedience to God in such simple matters as witnessing, discipling and helping people, and doing practical good works that God has called us to do.
These are personal decisions we have to make, and so many people just leave that all up in the air. The saints get to a certain point, and corporately we can go no further until individually we begin to respond positively to God’s calling.
He says, “I am going here.” I talked at the conference about a door. I do believe God wants a door. Now, who is responding to that? We say, “Well, if God wants to go, He will put a door here. Thank God, use the door.” Amen. We have absolved ourselves of all human responsibility, instead of asking, “What does that mean for me as an individual?”
It has to do very definitely with the whole fellowship corporately understanding Jesus in that revelation, but I want to talk to you individually. What does it mean for you to understand Jesus as the door? Are you responding to that call?
We have got to come to that place of personal response. We realize, “Where is the Lord?” and the Lord says, “I am moving here.” How come every time God moves out toward the world in redemptive love, we hang back? We say, “Well, go save them out there in the Baptist church. When they get good and saved, maybe they can understand what we are doing here.”
I do not think the full testimony of Jesus can be without a door. Do you have a window? You know what I think a window is? This is my understanding, so just be patient with me.
I believe a fellowship needs a window. All I mean by that is this: brothers and sisters who are saved, who come and experience life with us and sense the life of the Lord Jesus, must have a way in the fellowship to receive a real outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
If we are mum on that, if we pretend that is not a problem, then they have to go over to the Holy Ghost fellowship to find out what the Holy Spirit is and receive a real touch of the Holy Spirit. Then they can come back. That means there is no window.
Does God pour out from the throne His Holy Spirit? Yes. Now, I do not want to get into controversial doctrine over this whole thing, because I believe when somebody is saved, they receive the Spirit. But how about that outpouring and that anointing?
If we do not say anything about it, if we do not have any way of bringing people into it, then we say, “Why do you not go over and read this book and pray in your bedroom? If you come through, fine. We will just join all together.” I think that is lacking something, brothers and sisters.
If we have to struggle to find the living way of doing it so that we do not just do it in some dogmatic way—do you know what I am saying? There is already charismatic dogma about how you do it: “Take a deep breath, count to three, say ‘baby-bobby-boo,’ and it will start to roll.” Ah, come on. That is not the way God pours out His Holy Spirit.
Somebody might get that by the lucky-dip method, but that is not really God’s way. Now, come on, I am just telling the truth. We do not just clown around and have tricks we play on people to get their mind off themselves.
Somehow, I believe—I am not even just talking about personal outpouring. When I see the book of Acts, I do not see God pouring Himself out on one individual. I see God pouring Himself out on a bunch.
Not just one time, as in the initial case on the Day of Pentecost, but how about Acts 4? Those folks were so obedient. They were willing to go out into a world that was threatening them. As a result, God shook the place. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit. It was a corporate experience.
It was not just, “Oh man, glory to God, I got my bumps on July 22.” It was not a personal, “Me, I, me. I got my baptism.” It was, “Boy, we got shaken by the Holy Spirit on such-and-such a day. We went out with boldness and witnessed.”
I am looking for a door and a window. I believe every testimony of Jesus Christ has got to have an outpouring of the Spirit falling down and a door where people can come in and get saved.
There are a lot of other things: the altar. In many fellowships, and sometimes in charismatic groups, they have a door to salvation and a window to the Holy Spirit, but they have no cross. So it is all prosperity—up and up and up and up. But you need an altar too. I think you folks are working on that.
There are many other things we need. We need atmosphere. We could go on and on with this analogy. But the point is, we need to sincerely ask God, “What about these things, God?” We are not satisfied with always saying “the Holy Spirit” while having nothing to report and no way for people to come through.
Salvation? “Oh yeah, we are going to have gospel every Sunday.” This is the greatest intention, that you are here in the church today. Well, in these simple ways and in many other ways, we need to begin to ask God about things.
I think we need to set aside some seasons where we turn aside and are willing to abandon anything we have constructed by way of a human cistern.
If it is government, and we have gotten into the business of it and left the ministry of it, it is time to say, “God, we do not want to do this this way.” Government needs to set aside times where there is self-awareness of where it is coming from in order to continue on.
If we do not ask the question, “Where is the Lord in the midst of our government?” it starts to drift away. We get wrong motives and wrong ideas. We start pushing stuff. We start lording it over. We stop shepherding. It happens. It happens.
In our worship, we need to say, “Now, God, is this what You want for us? We gather like this; this is the way we know how to go now. Is there some correction or alteration, God? We want to give You the whole thing. If You want hymns up on the wall, tell us—but we want Your way.”
I think it is a sure way of keeping things alive. That is all I am saying. I believe it is the antidote for us falling into the trap that brothers and sisters have fallen into, regardless of our great wisdom.
Every configuration of the testimony of Jesus through history has fallen into the same trap: blessing leading to blindness, and prosperity leading to self-righteousness. The Lord begins to be grieved and slowly moves away.
Now, He never leaves His children. But as a testimony, you know what I am saying. I believe there is a certain grieving of God going on about so much of Christianity today, because so much of it is done by man, and then occasionally God is thrown into the situation. These things should not be.
Where is the Lord? What time is it? If we would just ask those questions, it would be such safety for us. If we would spend seasons just looking over what we are doing, what we are teaching, and what we are saying, it would be safety for us.
I only want to share that by way of help to you. I really believe we always need to ask, “Where is the Lord?” We need to be really honest about it. May God preserve us from ever being so proud that we just come out with these clichés, like, “Of course God is with us.”
I would to God it were that easy, I suppose. But actually, in the midst of blessings, sometimes you see a great derailing going on.
I share this with a particular burden in my own heart. Two great movements of God—real movements of God—on Long Island were both, just this summer, totally derailed.
One was a sort of Pentecostal retreat center, where the Lord raised up a brother. The place grew and led to the blessing and salvation of hundreds of people on Long Island. Recently, the brother was caught in an immoral fault and took off and went somewhere else. The whole place is damaged and destroyed; the testimony is ruined, and only a couple of folks are still deluded enough to stay in there.
In 1970, there was a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a Lutheran church in the middle of Long Island. It became a great center of charismatic renewal, and many people were saved—hundreds of people were saved. Then they began to go off, and they did not ask, “Where is the Lord?” because they were so zealous and so caught up in what was going on.
They went into a neo-Judaism. Recently, this summer, the man who leads the thing—they call him Abba—was caught and exposed, and written up in Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island, for homosexual activities with some of the young prophets. The whole thing is in disrepair. It is a shame to the Lord.
The Jews want nothing to do with them. They were trying to be a synagogue. They are called the Root of Jesse. The whole thing is derailed now, falling apart and collapsing around their ears.
You know something? Both of those places had the touch of the Lord in them back in 1973, when I left New York. It only took them less than ten years to stop asking where the Lord is, because they grew by leaps and bounds—from twenties to fifties to hundreds to five hundreds to thousands.
Six hundred families left Christianity, per se, and became Jews who embraced Jesus as Messiah. They kept kosher kitchens and such like as that. How could folks fall into such error and follow the teachings of the Talmud more than the teachings of the New Testament, to throw out Paul as anti-Semitic?
How could people fall like that? These were born-again Christians who loved the Lord and knew the Holy Spirit. They stopped asking, “Where is the Lord?” because they were so zealous. It seemed so right. They were following their hearts and their emotions.
God preserve us from following our hearts and our emotions. We are so easily deceived. We need to come to the place where we are honest enough before God to say, “Even if this tastes great, even if my goosebumps are running, God, I want Your way and not mine.”
If our emotions do not get us, then the enemy, if he can, will get us with our brain—with intellectual self-righteousness and dogmatic pride. You know what I am saying, and I need not pursue it any further.
We do not need to repent merely as an act, something we have to get over and then go on. What we really need in this day, as children living in an age of recovery where things are not back to normal yet and things have not been recovered, is a spirit of repentance.
By that, I simply mean that we need not get the idea that we are in. We need to be open to being corrected and changed by the Holy Spirit. We need to be careful.
I know sometimes it is so frustrating to be so careful. My brothers and sisters, if we are not careful, it always goes wrong. We have all seen, as we have picked up the pieces of Christian lives that have been broken, what happens when something gets derailed.
We need a spirit of repentance, simply. We do not let anything so run us away with ourselves that we do not ask, “Where is the Lord, and what time is it?” May God give us grace to do that.
Lord, I just make this appeal before Your throne. In days of blessing and outpouring, God, we have not deserved the outpouring that has come to us. We do not deserve the blessing that we have received.
We do not want to be deluded into thinking that maybe this is a sign that You are one hundred percent pleased with us. Oh God, so much we think Your goodness and forbearance are to lead us to repentance, to open our eyes to a more perfect way.
We want to be those people who are before You in times of blessing, saying, “Where is the Lord? Where is the Lord?” We just want to be sure. What time is it? Oh God, give us that kind of wisdom. Make us steadfast and sure.
Lord, establish Your testimony, and take all the time You want to do it. Raise up leadership. Oh God, do not allow us to push people falsely. Raise it up in a stable way.
Lord, raise up ministry workers. Lord, we do not want to push them, but God, You push them by Your Holy Spirit. Lord, may it be that all of us personally will ask You this question and be radical about it.
We who are so busy that we can hardly schedule You in—oh God, take us up on a mountain. Give us vision. Move us from seeing ourselves to seeing a whole city. Move us from seeing me to seeing us.
Move us from seeing the urgent to Your priorities. Move us from seeing maintenance to building. Oh God, please, by Your mercy, in this time of need, do not allow us to be deceived.
Oh Lord, we thank You for Your precious Word that keeps our hearts steadfast and true. We would take these words to our heart and always ask the question, “Where is the Lord?”
Lord, do manifest Yourself to us with each step of the way. I ask that You bless these saints as they continue on with Your Shekinah presence in everything, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.