And Dana Condon. And I come from New York, and I’ve been through these parts on other occasions. We had a good planning session yesterday. It’s good to be with you again today.
There’s a lot of scurrying around that goes on here, isn’t there? It’s all right. My only problem is all the good ones have left. This may be harder than I thought here.
Well, let’s pray.
Father, we know that the heavenly investment is that all things are done toward the dispensation of the fullness of times, when Christ would be the heading up of all things. Toward that end, we pray that the Bible study and thoughts this morning would bring us, by spiritual power, more fully into the fullness of Christ, whom we love.
We thank You for the precious teaching Holy Spirit, who not only interprets the words that are spoken, but sifts out that which is good. And, Lord, we ask that You would be the Teacher among us today.
We come to You with thanksgiving for Your precious Word and for the heart that You’ve placed in our lives. Now speak to our hearts, Lord Jesus, we pray. Amen.
I’d like you to turn to two passages of Scripture. The first one is in 2 Corinthians. Both passages are probably familiar to you.
Now I, Paul, myself urge you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am meek when face to face with you, but bold toward you when absent.
I ask that when I am present I may not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh.For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
And we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.
And then another familiar passage is John 16.
Would you give me a little more treble in there? I hear myself like a bass. You know, it’s strange when you talk and you have this microphone on, and the guy who’s talking isn’t you. I’m actually talking two octaves higher than you’re hearing this. I can’t believe this.
Well, anyway, John 16—there we go. Now that’s almost me. A little more treble and I’ll be there.
I have many more things to say to you, but they’re too exciting for Me to say right now.
Is that what your Bible says? Oh, wait a minute. I guess I read it wrong. Let’s try that again.
I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.
He shall glorify Me, for He shall take of Mine and shall disclose it to you.
All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.
Well, now we have two interesting passages here. You might wonder how they fit together. I’ll try to piece them together somehow this morning.
There’s a burden that’s been on my heart for more than a year. I’ve actually tried to write a book on this thing, but I haven’t gotten out of the introduction yet. I think it’s because I don’t know enough regarding this matter to get out of the introduction. So I’m somewhere in the introduction on this thing.
It has to do with this little passage in John 16: “But He, the Spirit of truth, when He comes, He will guide you into all truth.” Now, in that one little passage alone—“He will guide you into all truth”—I’ve got some good news and some bad news. That’s bad news to our flesh, that is.
Now, the good news is this: this passage is declaring something that, I suppose, must have been understood by the disciples immediately when Jesus spoke it. It is probably the first interpretation we have of what it means to be guided into all truth.
In fact, as the Spirit of God begins to talk to us, He starts teaching us the truth. We believe a lot of lies, but the Spirit comes along and teaches us the truth.
He focuses our lives more and more upon Jesus and teaches us about who He is. Maybe we heard stories, maybe we heard preaching, maybe we had stereotypes and caricatures; but the Holy Spirit comes along and teaches us the truth of Jesus. He teaches us the truth about our redemption, and how wonderful it is to be saved. He teaches us the truth about the world, about sin, and about life.
This Holy Spirit is committed to come, be united with us, and start to daily teach us and convince us by many infallible proofs regarding the truth. So whereas before we were basically liars and believed lies, now, by the Spirit of God, we as Christians begin to hear the truth, understand the truth, and are guided in.
Now, that’s exciting for anybody, even for Pontius Pilate, who asked the question, “What is truth?” Well, if he could only receive the Holy Spirit, he’d begin to learn. This is a wonderful thing. He starts to tell us the truth.
Now, the bad news—for our flesh. This passage, when it’s talking about the Holy Spirit guiding us into all truth, is doing more than just saying that the Spirit is going to come along like some kind of teacher and teach us true things.
What this passage is saying, when you look at this word truth and realize what it says in the Greek, is a little more pervasive than just the sense of truth as facts, understandings, and concepts.
When we take a deeper look at this passage, what it’s saying is this: the Holy Spirit, when He comes—Condon’s translation—He’s going to drag us into all truth.
And there, the word truth has the connotation—or it could be translated, when you look it up in Vine’s Expository Dictionary and one of these Greek helps—that this Greek word actually means truth in the sense of reality.
Not just truth as concept, but truth in the sense of reality. So the Holy Spirit will not only teach us true things, but He’ll start to drag us—and I say drag us—into reality.
In other words, He’s going to begin to integrate our lives, focused around Jesus, to the place where we become real by divine standards. What is reality?
Most of us came in the headway. We learned the concept; then the Holy Spirit said, “Good. Now you’ve got the concept,” and then He started dragging us in.
Now, it’s quite simple in one sense to receive a revelation of something that’s true. It’s quite another matter for the Holy Spirit, in a very comprehensive way, to drag us into the truth.
Why do I keep saying “drag”? It’s so positive here: “He will guide us.” But He has to drag us because the natural man goes kicking and screaming. We don’t like reality. Fantasy is so much better.
Have you ever been called in on the carpet? Have the brothers ever wanted to talk to you?
They set up an appointment, and for the whole day, as you’re waiting for that evening meeting, you’re all a-jitter. I mean, there’s such an ambivalence inside of you. Here’s this fight inside.
On the one hand, you say, “Oh no, they’re going to kill me. I know they’re going to give it to me and tear me up.” And there’s something else inside that says, “I want to know the truth. If I need to be corrected, I want to know the truth.”
You don’t know which one of these to do, and so you run away or call in sick. Or maybe you go. After you leave, maybe you have been—can I put it this way?—beaten up a little bit, but they told you something true, something that might even change your life.
It’s the same way with the Holy Spirit as He begins to guide us in the truth. It happens to be why I read that other passage in 2 Corinthians.
The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but they are divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses and every lofty thing in our minds that vaunts itself up against the knowledge of Christ, until every thought is brought into the obedience of Christ. There’s warfare going on there.
And if I read 2 Corinthians 10 right, He’s talking to Christians. There are fortresses up there in our brain. In some translations, wonderfully, it’s called imagination—modern-day fantasies.
These fantasies have a strange way of preventing reality from coming into our lives until they’re torn down and replaced by reality. Man, this is a tough game. But the Holy Spirit is committed to doing it.
So all of us go through the mill. For our whole lives, our entire Christian life, we go through this wonderful process of sanctification, where we begin to face reality.
Probably one of the last great bastions of fantasy today is the whole concept of marriage.
People have such wonderful ideas about what marriage will be like: cozy conversations over the little dining-room table in their cute little apartment, sort of rubbing noses and coochie-coochie and saying sweet little nothings every day when they come home from work.
She fixes great dinners and, of course, has all his shirts ironed and starched. She has all kinds of dreams about the Sir Galahad coming home and sweeping her off her feet, and all such things as this.
You just hear a couple getting ready to be married use words like home. You can smell the logs on the fire. Marriage has a whole mystique before marriage.
Some folks before the plunge even want to use words like “the bliss of marriage.” These words can only be said by faith by those who’ve entered in.
And you know what? Sometimes, in counseling situations, when down the road somewhere the marriage has gotten rocky, one of the biggest problems that has to be really worked through is getting people over the expectations they had of the marriage that didn’t work out the way they always dreamed.
Isn’t that sort of like the Christian life too? Aren’t we filled with unreality at times?
I remember before I was a Christian, I had a lot of mistaken ideas, just for starters. I was twenty years old when I was saved. It was a difficult work for the Holy Spirit to bring me to the reality that I am a sinner.
I just couldn’t believe it. I thought I was a good person who did things wrong occasionally. But a sinner? This takes the convincing work of reality to break into that.
It’s like an alcoholic admitting they’re an alcoholic. You’ve got a breakthrough on your hands if a person really sees in their heart, “Boy, I’m a sinner.” Then redemptive work can begin, because you see that you have to pursue something.
But of course, once we get Christian and the Lord saves us, then we’re totally realistic, right? Well, when I got saved, I felt I was good and saved. I was ready to smoke God. Nothing wrong with me now that I got the past taken care of.
Boy, what I didn’t know. I began to hear sermons and stuff that, in a sense, perpetuated my sense of unreality.
I was saved in a rather typical church where they kind of preached the message: once you got saved, you’re okay. When you die, you’re going to go to heaven. Okay, I said, “Ah, this is great. I’ve done everything required.”
I mean, after I baptized—of course, as soon as I baptized and started praying, then I was there. The Lord could take us home in the next busload. I was ready. There’s nothing more to do except go tell other people so they can get saved.
I didn’t understand what the epistles were even for. Who needs the epistles when you’ve got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? They’ve got the gospel.
Then the Holy Spirit starts walking by your side. You start to see some basic inconsistencies in your life: a little bit of reality here, a little bit there; some misunderstandings of what it means to serve God.
See, I wanted to give God my best of my natural life to serve God. He never was too satisfied with that. You know, He’d frustrate you. You know what I mean?
Just when you got the real flow in ministry or something, He’d pull the plug, and you’d be damaged and laying on the floor. He just had to prove to my stubborn brain that He wasn’t just satisfied totally with me. He loves me, but He kept on creaming me.
And so I learned some basic lessons. We’re all given to this unreality, and it’s a fantasy world. It’s a fantasy.
Now, of course, it’s in the news so much recently that we have to use it as an illustration, I suppose. But the whole charismatic movement has suffered a great blow because of tremendous unreality.
Their blind trust in leaders is so pathetic that even after open sin, they still want to follow the same leaders. This is unreality. This is so unscriptural, it doesn’t even bear pointing out—except that there are people so caught in that unreality that the Scriptures don’t make any difference to the way they feel.
Myself, as a fellow charismaniac—some of you perhaps also have been through that route—we believed the most incredible things. We had the most positive outlooks. Everything was, “Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.”
Which was actually more or less a cop-out for facing the fact that the Lord sometimes was trying to deal with something. Now, of course, all of us need to be able to say, “Praise the Lord anyhow,” in difficult circumstances. But when that becomes a technique, there’s unreality creeping in. You know what I’m saying?
We had a way, as charismaniacs, of idealizing our spiritual experience. Now, can I be honest with you? Many of you might not know who these people are. I’m talking about the charismatics—people who were baptized in the Spirit in the conventional definition of things, and they spoke in tongues.
For most of them, I’m going to be honest with you, they came into this kind of gifting and things the difficult way. They doubted, they went and prayed, they had people massage their scalps, they read books.
Then maybe after much prayer, one night on their knees, they said, “Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” and God opened their heart. Maybe they really began to speak in a gift of tongues, or something happened to them—wonderful and tremendous—but it usually happened slowly and after a lot of travail.
Now, three years later, as they’re explaining their experience, they have so idealized that thing that it sounds like God fell down from the sky and totally obliterated them. “I didn’t know if I was in the body or out of the body. I spoke in unutterable languages.” Really, they said, “Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” when they started out.
But you see, we like to idealize things. Just like in my old tradition, we idealized what it was like to be saved, as if one day we knew we were dirty and lost and nothing, and then we had one commitment at one moment, and it was magic, and we were totally saved.
We knew everything was fine, and it was all turned around, when actually it took six months to get that kind of assurance of our salvation. How we like to idealize things and cast things in terms that sound so wonderful, but that wasn’t the reality of what happened.
So, if you know some charismaniacs, they used to be a good example of unreality, only to be superseded by us.
Small-group fellowship-type people can be filled with unreality. I don’t know if you see that. I’m not talking about you; I’m talking about the person next to you. You’re okay.
But unreality—how it affects us. Fantasy.
As I go from place to place, I see there are a certain number of people who’ve caught church vision, who basically have mobile homes so that they can travel from meeting to meeting in a sort of vagabond search for the perfect fellowship that now they’ve seen in vision.
Of course, they never find it. But they’ve got vision—that is, visionis ex libris, book vision. They have it all down theoretically. They understand, quote, “church vision,” but they just can’t find any place that’s it.
So they go around very independently. Oh, they won’t be built in somewhere. Besides, you can see if you look outside and see a mobile home with the motor running, somebody here this morning that I may be talking to. They’re ready to head out to the next meeting.
Independent people. The reality is, we can’t be built in reality unless we’re in community. It just doesn’t happen independently.
But no, no. “I know all the truth. I’ve seen it all.” That is deception.
We really want to be all the Lord wants us to be, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it also becomes a haven for a lot of folks who are reacting to somebody putting pressure on them. So they come to a haven where nobody puts pressure on them, and all they’re doing is reacting. That’s unreality.
The Christian life has no pressure to it? That can’t be real, is it? No, but this is a nice haven for that.
This kind of assembly can even be a haven for would-be preachers who feel a bit frustrated because they don’t feel like they want to go four years to seminary, so this is a free ride. Anybody can preach here. Just act good for a while. Well, look, He invited me.
Some fellow tucked in the group is liable to be a frustrated preacher, somebody just looking for another pulpit. No, they’d never admit that. They don’t admit that to themselves, because everybody who is in something like this—or up where I live, a similar sort of assembly—we’re here because we love the Lord.
There’s not much other reason for being here unless you really love the Lord. But there’s mixture too. There’s unreality too. There’s fantasy too.
We can perpetuate these things unless we come to the place where we, as God’s people, get so hard-pressed in spirit and so radical with our own self-life that we’re willing to say, “We demand reality. We just don’t want unreality.”
Sometimes when people go off half-crazy and half-cocked and into all kinds of error, and they come out and they’ve been part of the Christian churches, sometimes we’ve planted the seed of unreality. We’ve allowed people to get away with unreality too long—super-spirituality or super-libertinism—when that wasn’t the reality the Spirit was trying to convey.
Well, it’s good news. When the Spirit comes, He’s going to guide us into reality.
There’s another kind of unreality that can plague us besides fantasy. That other kind of unreality is called being a realist. But that’s also unreality.
Now, a realist is one who’s been stripped to the point where they see the unreality of a lot of things going on, and they become cynical, negative, and critical.
They say, “That’s not real. The worship’s not real. Prayer—not real.” They can pick out pretty well what’s not real, and they become what they call realists. But I want to tell you, they’re also in unreality.
How can I say something like that? You want an example of that? Well, of course, we’re the prime one. But if you want to go beyond ourselves, the fighting fundies are the best example—fundamentalists who only take joy in fighting people.
They are totally convinced that everybody’s wrong but them. There was probably an increase of twenty percent in real fundamentalist churches that have that fighting spirit on Black Tuesday, the day after Black Monday. These people rejoiced.
When something bad happens, these folks say, “See, I knew it all the time. I’ve been prophesying it for nine years.” Suddenly the stock market falls: “We knew it all along.”
They thrive in being negative. They hold people in negative traps. The whole mindset is negative and critical. They don’t do anything themselves of a positive nature, but all they do is tear down everything anybody else wants to do.
They can pick at every evangelist for his fleshly ways. They can pick at every sort of financial program or any kind of building, or they can pick and judge and criticize. They call themselves realists, and actually they’re unreal too.
You know why I say they’re unreal? Because our standard is our Lord Jesus. Our Lord Jesus looked around Jerusalem and saw the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and scribes, and yet He never was bitter. He never was cynical. You never saw Him just throw useless darts at people and make excuses, did you?
Jesus is reality. What He saw around Him, even among His own disciples, would be cause for despair by one of these so-called realists. But Jesus was not despairing, and that’s reality too.
If you get the point of what I’m trying to say, some people say all those people who are idealists, believing the best, are fools. Well, if you’re an idealist, you have an unreality fantasy; and if you’re a quote, “realist,” you don’t have reality either.
What does the Scripture say about reality? There’s so much, but I just want to point out one little thing. It says the Holy Spirit guides us into reality.
This means there’s a very intimate relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. That’s the only way we can be guided into true reality. Otherwise, we’ll be dashed onto rocks either way.
What happens to an idealist when everything doesn’t work out the way they think? Thursday and Friday, I spent out in the Richmond community witnessing, out here in another fellowship, along with some friends of mine from years back.
We went to places, and it was amazing how many times I found born-again Christians who were part of some Spirit-filled assembly who weren’t going to church any longer. You know what the problem was?
They still said they believed everything. They believed in Jesus, they believed Jesus died for their sins, and they were saved. But they had some kind of idealistic and fantasy view of what the Christian life should be like.
It proved to be irrelevant to their everyday, workaday-world life, until they said, “Well, I’m just not going anymore, because I believe all that stuff, but I just don’t see how it fits in. How is that relevant to me?”
An idealistic person, after the thing doesn’t work long enough, just becomes confused. A realist person, as they go on in their Christian lives, becomes cynical and bitter.
But only the Holy Spirit can guide us down through the siren rocks that would drive us into despair or into confusion and lead us into reality. It’s so easy to become cynical when you see things and people who let you down in the church, and folks who aren’t what they’re supposed to be.
It’s so easy to become bitter unless you’re following the Holy Spirit into reality. It’s a very intimate relationship that Jesus is telling us about here. When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He’ll guide us into that precious reality.
You know, again, we can come back to the example of marriage. I say that marriage is sort of like the whole space program, in one sense. I’ve got it figured out. Marriage is sort of like a rocket, you see.
When the guy says, “I do,” then those big booster rockets just blast off. You go into romantic heaven.
You know those big rockets down there at Cape Kennedy? Those things are standing—I don’t know how tall. How high is that thing? A hundred feet high? Sixty feet of that hundred feet are booster rockets that last thirty seconds. But they sure are powerful.
Liquid oxygen in there, man. That stuff’s smoking and blowing and blasting. It gets you right up through the G’s, and now you’re sailing thousands of miles an hour. Within one minute, when they jettison off, you’re traveling several thousand miles an hour, going right through the G’s and up into the heavens.
Romance is a wonderful thing. There’s nothing like blasting off after the “I do.” Some folks have smaller rockets, but this is the principle of the thing.
But a few seconds after that, the big old booster rocket falls off, and the guy gets over shaking from the G’s. Then they have that secondary rocket that’s actually supposed to get you into marriage orbit.
Now, that second stage, I call sort of the mutuality stage. “We’re going to do things together, right? Yeah, we’ll have our home, we’ll have our kids, we’ll have our jobs and our places to go, and we’ll have our life.”
This sort of mutual stuff in common works real good. It gets you up into orbit. I think that’s good for a couple of years.
But of course, that falls off, and you’re left with the friendship shuttle. Now, folks, if you don’t have any show once you get up in the big sky, and you are living together every day, in and out, in a weightless environment, you’re in trouble.
You’re squeezing toothpaste wrong, and it’s floating through the sky, and all this mess is happening. If you don’t have a real relationship when you’re up there, it doesn’t matter about those boosters; they’ve fallen off. The mutual experience becomes a separating experience.
I bet you two astronauts who don’t get along have it pretty tough up there. As a matter of fact, even if you have a good marriage, you get claustrophobic up there after a while.
What happens is that the fantasy of what I thought my wife looked like, and what you find out, begins to take hold. The reality begins to settle in up there in the friendship shuttle.
You see each other every day. You see him with the flu and sneezing and looking bad. The guy walks around the house in his undershirt and has left his teeth in the glass. The woman’s got her hair up, and there you are. You’re in the shuttle. There’s no getting out. I mean, you can try, but you’ll just blow up.
And you get stripped. You know what I’m saying? You get stripped. You had such good manners. The guy opened the door; now he goes through and slams the door.
All those veneers get cut off, get cut away, and you get to the place where it’s real. You realize that you are married to—and you yourself—you are an animal.
Now, it’s at that point that I’d like to say maybe the most significant thing of the morning. I don’t know how it all worked out.
That moment, that final stripping, where you’ve gotten down there and it’s pretty raw—you are just pretty naked in a full sense. It’s husband and wife, and you know each other very well.
You are at what I’m going to call the brink of divorce or the threshold of reality. It’s the same moment in time.
It’s the same moment you come to the end of yourself. You’re at the brink of divorce and call it quits: “That’s not the woman I married, and that’s not what I want.” You’re ready to quit. It is also the threshold to reality.
Now, threshold is an interesting word. I looked it up in Webster’s one day and found out that one definition of threshold is the end of the runway where you have to take off.
When you get to the end of the runway, you’ve got to pull back that stick by faith and say, “I’m going to hold on to this girl because God put us together.” You just might find what love really is.
It wasn’t having somebody peel your grapes. It wasn’t having some kind of dream girl waltzing around the house. Real love is when you love even when somebody doesn’t seem momentarily worth it.
Real love is when you give, really because you share something with somebody because you have decided to do it, and not because you have a sense of, “Well, if I do this, she’ll do that.”
You start to find out what love really is. Somebody who’s been through that for a while—and I see some heads nodding here, so thank God for that—those people know what it really means to love.
If you’ve been down to the end, at the brink of divorce, and hung on long enough, you start to find out what it’s really like to love one another and care for one another.
Strange things happen. The man starts finding manners again and treating his wife with respect and with modesty. Strange things like that start to happen when you really learn the reality of love.
That kind of love nobody can take away.
It’s the same way in the Christian life. It seems like the Lord has to strip us down, take away our veneers, our posturing, our feeling that we’re this and we have this strength and that; or we want to see the Lord do this and that, so we try to do it for Him.
Whatever way it happens to us, we come to the place where we get stripped down to a reality. Some folks—I have to say this because it’s part of the reality—some folks divorce the Lord and basically walk away.
They say, “I’m offended by the church. I’m offended by God’s people. I’m offended by fake leaders. I’m offended by this kind of life,” and they walk right out.
Some folks pull back the stick and begin to understand what real Christian life is all about. A stripping process.
It can be traumatic, can’t it? The Lord rubs us together with folks. It can be intense. What are you going to do? You’ve got the free will. You can quit. You can quit on it if you want.
Or you can come into reality. It’s the same moment in time. It depends on whom you’re going to follow.
Some folks who quit, I tell you, I can’t blame them in the flesh. But there’s no excuse not to follow the Spirit. When you get right down to it, there’s no excuse not to follow the Spirit. He’ll take us into reality. We’ll learn what life is really about.
So how do we follow the Spirit into reality? Just a few comments here, and then I’m going to quit.
The best thing that can happen to us is when we realize that we’re unreal in some way. Let me put it another way: a great moment in our lives is when we realize we lean. We’re biased in certain ways.
We’re talking about fellowship life, Christian experience, and our spirituality—where we are. Do you realize you lean, or do you really think you’re balanced?
I don’t know about you, but I know I’ve got a peg leg. I limp and I lean according to my temperament, according to what I like. I lean. I do.
That’s why I can only know reality by staying in fellowship with other brothers and sisters who can come at the other side. Only if we hold on to each other are we ever going to enter into real reality, because the fullness of Christ is more pervasive and comprehensive than any one of us as an individual part.
But do you realize you lean? Oh, come on now. Are you the careful kind, the foot-dragger? Well, welcome to the body of Christ.
Are you the mover and the shaker, the initiator? Well, welcome to the body of Christ. Now, are you guys together? Watch out. Reality is on the way.
But we need to know we lean. You know why we need to know we lean? First of all, because it helps us in the body of Christ to realize that maybe my other brother, who comes from quote, “the other side of things,” may be right in this case.
That might be the will of God—for us to go out and beat on doors and witness for Jesus—even though I don’t feel that. But some people want to just sit home and pray for the lost.
Some folks say, “No, we’ve got to go.” That kind of reality is always uncomfortable. Isn’t reality always uncomfortable at first? It certainly is to our natural life, until we see that in reality the Spirit is there, and He flows, and He’s alive.
I have such a struggle with reality in my own life. I don’t know how you feel that.
Up there where I live, we’ve been praying for different people, Christian brothers and sisters of ours, praying that God would recover them back to His people and back into fellowship. We’ve been praying and praying and praying.
God recently spoke to me and said, “Dan, I want you to go and talk to those people, and stop just praying.” Why? We’ve been praying for those folks; nothing’s been happening. He said, “Go talk to them.”
I went and talked to them, and they moved. They came to the fellowship. Why am I so unrealistic that I think all I’ve got to do is pray and that’s the end of my responsibility?
If the Lord says, “Now go and fellowship with that person and tell them the truth,” then I need to go. I don’t know why I struggle with that. I’d much rather just pray back.
But the Lord says, “No, I want reality.” Sometimes reality—we always have to come back to the definition of reality, which is what? It is Jesus incarnate. It isn’t just the deity; it’s the human as well.
The love of the Lord is a magical blend of the power of His Spirit in the hand of a friend. There’s always the human-vessel side to this thing.
If we get too spiritual, then where are the members functioning in these ways we’re praying about? I don’t know. I have such a difficulty with it.
Somehow, I guess I always talk to you guys about evangelism in some way, don’t I? Last time I was here—well, I don’t know. It’s a personal struggle on my part, because I feel haunted by a burden for people who are lost.
Yet every time I go somewhere, I feel like maybe I must be wrong because nobody, it seems, has that burden sometimes. Oh, maybe what we do, we talk.
But I don’t have to go up on the other side of Richmond to an assembly that’s nothing along the terms of my own vision. There I could knock on doors with people, there we talked to the lost, there people came under conviction, and there people got saved.
I don’t know why we can’t do that. I mean, we do. We want to. We pray. We’ve got the intentions, but…
So I say we just need to seek the Lord and say, “O Lord of the harvest, are we being real about this? Are we really following the Lord of the harvest?”
Come on, we’ve got to be real. Let’s not be filled with unrealities. “Oh, it’s up to the Lord. Well, the Lord has to do it.” It’s true. Only the Lord can bring in a harvest. He’s the Lord of the harvest.
But sometimes, I don’t know, I feel we need to get a little more honest about that.
Even with our Good Shepherd, Jesus, we need to go inquire of Him and say, “Oh, Lord, You’re such a Good Shepherd, but we don’t feel like we’re shepherds. But are we sheeping like we’re supposed to?”
Are you sheeping? I mean, if you’re a sheep, you should be sheeping. Well, what does that mean? I don’t know, but even sheeping involves a lot more love than we sometimes give one another. Real care.
I’m always afraid to mention the need for shepherding in our midst because folks always kind of zero in on the leaders and say, “Yeah, yeah, we need more shepherding.”
But really, what the Spirit of Christ wants to do is bring us all into the responsibility of shepherding on a very grassroots basis.
He wants to give a sister who’s just part of the body here a sensitivity to know that there’s another sister who’s not been here for four weeks in a row, and give her the guts to call and ask, “What’s going on? What can I do? Can I pray for you?”
Shepherding is a spiritual matter, but it does take on legs if we’re going to be real about it. Do we really have a Shepherd in our midst, or if somebody needs shepherding, do they have to go somewhere else?
I can’t tell you. I don’t have a realometer tied onto Richmond. I don’t know where you guys are registered on the scale. But we need to be real.
Our Lord Jesus is real. He’s always more humble than we are. He’s always more down to earth. He’s always more willing to contact the world than we are, and He’s always more willing to reach out to a Christian brother or sister than we are. He’s way ahead of us.
But we sometimes get the idea that we’re way ahead in this matter, and actually we need basic reality.
I love Christian brothers and sisters in whom I sense the reality of Christ. You know what I always find about them? They’re more simple than I am.
They’ve got it down to something more simple than I’d ever figured on. For me, it’s a complicated mess. “Well, let’s see, we’re going to go out and witness. Now, what should we do first?” Meanwhile, the guy’s going out and knocking on the door.
Real people are more simple than spiritual people, if spiritual is used as unreal. When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He’s going to guide us into reality, and He’s going to strip away unreality.
But if a person is stripped of unreality, that’s still not reality. Then there has to be a building up into reality.
You don’t just take a married couple who’s in some trouble and strip them down. Then something has to be built: basic trust, communication, meaningful communication, and new expectations that are realistic expectations of one another. You’ve got to rebuild that situation.
You can’t just leave it like, “All right, we’re stripped.” Sometimes, well-meaning saints that we are, we strip each other down, so we’re standing there saying, “Okay, I know that you’re a nerd and I’m a nerd. Now where do we go from here?”
The best thing we can do is fellow nerds just neutralize each other. So here’s what happens: if you ever say we’re going out witnessing, I’m going to say, “No, we shouldn’t do it. That’s your flesh.” If I ever say, “Let’s have an all-weekend fasting and prayer meeting,” you say, “No, that’s other flesh pain.”
We’ll agree to neutralize each other, and that way nobody’s going to get into trouble here. Oh, no. How are we ever going to find reality then?
Unless we come to the place where we begin to encourage one another, even though we’re incomplete. Oh, that’s a tough part: encouraging one another when there’s still some loose ends.
And begin to trust one another’s burdens, even if it’s not our particular one. Something might happen there.
I’m not talking about a lot of external things, really. I’m talking about something a little deeper. I’m talking about a basic trust that we have.
Isn’t that the case? If you’ve talked to somebody who’s in a damaged marriage situation, doesn’t it always get down to some kind of trust? Something’s broken down there. There’s got to be fiat trust.
“I trust this guy. Even if he has goofed it up a million times, I’ve got to trust this person or I can’t go on.” You can’t go on with somebody you don’t trust—not in the reality of a relationship.
So with us, as brothers and sisters together, there’s got to be something of a trusting of Christ in one another if we’re going to be built into reality.
I don’t know if it’s fantasy or if I just dream about that reality, but I sure do think it’s a precious thing when you see saints on the way. Because there is real life there.
When they love one another, it isn’t just all sentimental love—you know, backslap and love. “Oh, I love you, Jesus, hallelujah.” You don’t even know the guy.
I love meetings where I don’t know people. I hug them all. Back home, I’ve got to go, “Give me grace to hug this person,” because I know them.
But to have a group of people, none of whom have made it, but all of whom are asking the Spirit to bring us into reality—there must be a precious and salutary life in the midst of such people.
There is a freedom, sometimes a freedom even to try and make a mistake. But a freedom.
There is a sense of stability there, because nobody’s going to go off on some kind of crazy path when you’re being held together. Yet there is an openness in the midst.
Probably, in such a real fellowship, there would be more and more appreciation of the simplest things.
I love it when I meet a saint who’s been a warrior for years, who really loves the Lord, and he just mentions something like the blood of Jesus and starts to cry.
Now, the blood of Jesus means something to every Christian. But to somebody who’s been around for years, it’s something special.
Or you mention something like the mercy of God. You can’t know the mercy of God until you fail a million times and He keeps on preventing you from fainting.
Paul says, “But for the mercy of God, we faint not. We press on.” That meant something special to Paul. Don’t you feel like, when he used the word mercy, it had a capital M on it?
Reality is that appreciation of the simplicity of Christ and the reality of Christ.
I was just sharing with somebody last night—Stella. We were talking about some things. She had me marching down the street, and Mac and I were on one of her walking tours.
There we were walking down the street at about fifteen miles an hour, wasn’t it? We were panting and talking. I said, “You know what reality is, and how precious reality is?”
There was a sister who came down to the conference this summer from New York. As it happened circumstantially, she came down with a migraine headache that lasted all week. She missed all the meetings except the first one and the last one, both of which Joshua spoke at.
She didn’t get to hear Stephen or Lance or Gene. There she was on Saturday morning, and Joshua was speaking. A lot of people had already left. She was sitting there, and this was the second meeting she got to all week.
Joshua shared about the providential hand of God behind everything that happens. That woman got such a touch of life in her. The reality of Jesus, through Joshua’s real life, came through and captivated her heart.
She said, “I got all I needed at the time.” That afternoon, the headache abated. She chewed on that morsel, and she’s still chewing on it.
When you ask her what the conference was like, she says, “It was great. They talked about the providential hand of God.”
Well, what’s the story, folks? There we had a brother, a simple brother, who’s tasted reality. He shared reality, and we got a download of reality that some folks don’t get for their entire life, sitting somewhere just trying to scratch it out of something going on up in the front of a church.
There’s something there, isn’t there, when life comes across? All the fears go. The natural life says, “So what if I have to be violent to myself? So what if the Spirit has to deal in my areas of hedging and fudging, and the barriers that I put up, and the imaginations and the fortresses?”
So what if the Spirit has to bust them down? You just taste the little realities: “I’ve got to have more.” Taste and see that the Lord is real.
There’s no more sane and better way to walk than to walk into reality with the Holy Spirit holding our hands. That’s the way to go, don’t you think?
So let’s admit it. You have barriers up. I have barriers up. Neither one of us likes reality. We still prefer fantasy.
But the Holy Spirit comes along and says, “I’ll teach you reality. We’ll find out what the love of Jesus really means. We’ll find out what it means to love one another. We’ll find out what these words, koinonia and all these other big words, really mean.”
Isn’t that wonderful? Let’s all write a book of Christian works just the day we go to be with Jesus, because we’ll understand more what these words mean.
And He, when the Spirit of reality comes, He will lead us into all reality. Let’s hang on to that. I guess we better, because I think I hear the stripping machine coming to do a little bit more work.
Lord Jesus, we’re so thankful, as You sent Your Son, that You sent the Spirit. That Spirit, just as You walked through Galilee teaching the disciples true things regarding the kingdom of God, also showed them character matters, matters dealing with reality in their own lives.
Now You promise to send the Spirit of the same ilk, with the same intention: to take us from our religious trappings, caricatures, ideas, and stereotypes, and bring us to reality.
We take hold of that promise. Even as we are here this morning, I want to pray specifically for my brother who’s at the threshold of divorce or the threshold of reality. I pray for my sister who is at the same brink. I pray for those people who’ve been stripped and are hurting now.
Build them in the reality, Lord. We know that they will have a testimony, even as our brother Joshua had a testimony based on reality.
Oh, Lord Jesus, there’s nowhere else we can go. You’ve drawn us in too far to turn back. Where else can we go? You alone have the words that we need.
We’ve gotten halfway, and we’ve gotten stripped down, and the cross has been working on our lives, and things have been happening. Oh, Spirit of God, now show us the reality so that we can stand to live in these days.
We don’t want to go down the tubes bitter and cynical, disparaging of life. We don’t want to be those whose testimony is, “Nothing works. It all fails.” We don’t want to be in the Ecclesiastes syndrome.
Lord, show us now the reality of Jesus that cleanses our hearts and removes all bitterness and, despite all trials and tribulations, keeps us pressing on with an abounding spirit that cannot be defeated.
We talk of serious things this morning, and we have a serious Comforter along with us. Lead us on, precious Lord. Lead us on.
Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit. Show us Jesus anew. Holy Spirit.