Lord, we have sung this morning joyously that Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God. He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious life.
Lord, if You have done this to bring us to Yourself, what will You withhold from us to bring us to glory? Lord, You have given us love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness without measure, for You have given us the Spirit without measure.
And, Lord, we depend upon these things this morning. Lord, we depend upon You. We need You, Lord.
Lord, we want to come to Your word. Lord, we want to have it go into our hearts and really find good ground there, and to bear fruit. Lord, we want to be changed. Lord, we want to be equipped. Lord, we are not able either to speak, or to hear, or to do anything. But, Lord, You are with us.
And we have been praying, Lord, leading up to this time; and, Lord, even as we are before You right now, even as we speak this morning, we are still in prayer, believing, Lord, because we know that You delight to give good gifts to Your children. So, with thanksgiving and believing hearts, we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Could you turn in your Bibles to Genesis 17, verse 1?
Now when Abram was ninety and nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am God Almighty;
walk before Me, and be thou perfect.
Verse 3:
And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him.
Now, if you would turn to Exodus 6, verse 2:
And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Lord:
and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as God Almighty,
but by My name the Lord I was not known to them.
Sunday I was in Puerta Valley, and I was honored to share a word with the saints there. While I was there, I had a burden especially for the young people. Now, a word that we have from the Lord is profitable for everyone, I think, but there is always the direction of that burden in a special direction.
Sunday it was a burden for the young people there, so I said, “I would like to speak to the young people, and everyone else can listen.” This morning, I would like to say who my burden is for. In contradistinction to Sunday, my burden this morning is for the older saints.
Paul spoke of giving the saints milk, as opposed to solid food, or meat. He spoke to them in 1 Corinthians about that. He wanted to speak to them as spiritual men, but he had to speak to them as babes.
John spoke in his first epistle:
I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.
I write unto you, little children, because ye know the Father.
I write unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the evil one.
I write unto you, fathers, because ye know Him that is from the beginning.
And that is where the Lord would take us—not this morning, but in your and my short little lifetime, the little time that we have left to us on the earth. It is just enough time, perhaps, if we will be in agreement with Him and allow Him to bring us into fullness. But probably we do not have any time to waste, whatever time we have.
The Lord wants to bring His children into fullness, into this relationship with Him who was from the beginning.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
There is a fellowship and an intimacy with the Lord Jesus that God would bring us into, that, if we do not allow Him, is something that we could never know.
I have five children, and my oldest son is about twelve years older than my youngest sons—they are twins. When they were growing up, of course, when they were about six years old, he was eighteen already, my man.
They had a brotherly relationship, and they loved each other, but they could never, at that age, really connect man to man, because it was always man to child. Now they have grown up, and now there is a deeper relationship.
Oh, how our Lord wants to bring many sons to glory! Oh, for the fellowship with Him. Our Lord is not like we are naturally, and He would change us and bring us to that place of intimacy, making us like He is.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:6:
Yet we do speak wisdom among them that are fullgrown.
Now, I am hoping that this word that the Lord has put within me this morning has begun me to speak. I refrain from saying, “Now, this is to the mature ones,” because if you came to visit me where I live and said, “Now, I have a word for the mature,” I would think you were speaking to someone else. I would say, “Well, I will listen in, but it must be for this one or that one.”
So I would not say that, but I would say this: this word this morning is for those who are maturing, who are in this way with the Lord, in this race and running this race, and desire to run it to maturity.
If you have a resolve to know the Lord Jesus as your Head in all things—I am not saying that He is necessarily de facto reality in all things—but if you have this resolve, “Lord, I will know You and Your headship in my life over all things”;
if you have a desire to know the work of the cross in you in a complete way;
if there is a desperation in you that Jesus Christ be your life—then this word is for you.
I salute the zeal of the person who wants to give the Lord a larger place in his life. I salute that, and may that happen. But, oh, if that is your desire, if you have this zeal, I pray that this zeal in you and in me would bring us to two conclusions.
One is that it would bring us to the end of desiring that the Lord would merely have a substantial place in our lives. The other is a desperation that Jesus would be our life.
Perhaps these three things might earmark those who are maturing:
Many of us here have been seeking this thing called the house of God that the Lord is building—the reality of the church in our midst—for many years.
Some of us were speaking the other day, and Floyd mentioned that the saints there in Puerta Valley, when we were in Pasadena, had begun with the Lord forty years ago. Forty years.
I remember that Lance has probably been in this place for about fifty years, because about twenty-nine or thirty years ago I visited him in Holford House in England. The reason we visited was because we had heard that these people had been meeting under the headship of the Lord Jesus for twenty years, and we wanted to go see this sign, this wonder that did not consume.
We had only been gathering for a little while ourselves, and so we went. They were so gracious to us.
Lance, not too many years ago, said, “You know what you looked like when you came to visit us?” He said, “You looked like a pirate.”
Well, I think I did look like a pirate. They were very conservative English people, and they were so full of the Lord and so graciously received us, had fellowship with us, and just ignored the piracy.
Now, I do not think I look like a pirate anymore, at least on the outside. If you look at my heart, you might tell me there is a pirate residing there.
But there have been another fifty years, or forty years, or thirty years—or however many years—that the Lord has revealed the desire of His heart to us, and we have been in this way with Him.
I do not know about you in every situation and circumstance, but I know that in many cases one of the laws of thermodynamics takes sway, and that is that everything is winding down. That which began with life, and real love for the Lord, and joy—sometimes those things can slowly erode away.
Where we were desiring fellowship and being built up in love, now we are just having meetings. Sometimes our young people grow up, get on fire for the Lord, and want to serve the Lord and know the Lord, really being completely the Lord’s.
Sometimes, to our shame, the last thing they would ever think of would be to stay in the house of the Lord and become a living stone in the holy and royal priesthood, because they know us too well. The thought is, “Well, I will have to go someplace, if I really want to get hold of the Lord in heaven and to really get hold of Him.”
And that is not as it ought to be. Oh, that the Lord would build us in a way, and allow us to overcome in a way, that we would be continually going on with Him.
If the house of the Lord in our midst is not being built, there is no testimony. It is a continual building up.
Sometimes we just, through the law of thermodynamics, wind down to find a comfortable place, both as an assembly and perhaps as individuals, and just sort of camp out there. Almost, you might say about us, “Well, the old is good enough.”
But the Lord is not finished with us. He does not want to be finished with us, and He wants to take us onward.
But the message that I have this morning is not for the corporate; it is for the individual. It is for this one and that one who are maturing and who desire to come to fullness in the Lord Jesus.
I do not think the Lord can get the corporate without getting the individual. If we are ten, or twenty, or thirty compromised believers, when we get together it is not that, when we are all together, it is glory, and then we go back home to our compromise. No, no.
If we are ten, twenty, thirty, or forty compromised believers, when we get together, that is what we have. That is the testimony. That is the depth. If there is no depth in any of us, there is no depth in all of us.
I think in order for the Lord to get what He wants corporately, He has to get what He wants in us as individuals. Do not think that you can just go to the gatherings of the saints and sort of be there, and that if the saints go on with the Lord, they will take you, even though you might be with them physically.
The Lord is after the individual.
I think of Paul, our brother Paul, on the road to Damascus. When the Lord called him, He called him to Himself, and He called him to a ministry. He said what it was: “I am delivering thee from the Jewish people, and from the nations, unto whom I send thee.”
Clear. On the day he was saved, he was gifted and called.
Now, you might think, “Well, the nations, the Gentiles, were out there dying without the Lord, and now the man that the Lord had set apart from before he was born to be the apostle to the Gentiles is saved. He has the Holy Spirit, and he knows the Scriptures. He learned them as a Pharisee. Now he can go straight into this ministry.”
You know, it was fifteen years, at least, from the time that Paul was called on that road to the day when the Holy Spirit said:
Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.
Then they were sent out by the Holy Spirit. Fifteen years of preparation.
If it was this way with Paul, and what the Lord wanted to do, how much more with us? The Lord could not get Corinth, He could not get Ephesus, He could not get the city in Antioch, He could not get Philippi, until He had a man.
And the same thing has to do with our local assemblies. Unless the Lord has us, what do we have? There has to be a critical mass of brothers and sisters who are given to Him, whom He is really bringing into glory.
Consider what I have to say this morning before the Lord. He wants you. He wants me for Himself.
The Lord had to get Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or He could not have gotten Israel. Without getting Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob completely, the Lord could not get the nation for Himself. He could not get a family for Himself, a bride for Himself, a nation for Himself, or a kingdom for Himself. So He began with these brothers.
I read in Genesis 17:1 that the Lord, when Abraham was ninety-nine years old, appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty.”
I would like you to notice a couple of things that happened at this moment. This is the first moment El Shaddai is used in the Scripture. This is the first time in Scripture that a man is recorded as prostrating himself in the presence of the Lord.
And I would also like you to notice that Abraham was ninety-nine years old when the Lord came to him in this way.
The Lord spoke to Moses later and said, “I am the Lord, and I revealed Myself to them as El Shaddai, but by My name, the Lord, I did not reveal Myself to them.” What could that mean? It probably means an infinite amount of things, because our God is infinite. But I want to consider one thing that it means this morning.
They certainly knew the name of the Lord. If you go to the Scriptures, all through those early Scriptures which Moses wrote, you find that from the very beginning they were using the name of the Lord.
Genesis 15:7 says:
I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees.
Sarah says in Genesis 16:2:
Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing.
In Genesis 18:14 we read:
Is anything too hard for the Lord?
And Abraham, in Genesis 21:33, called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God. Well then, what does it mean: “I made Myself known to them as God Almighty, but by My name, the Lord, I did not make Myself known”?
The Lord speaks of God in His eternalness, and our Lord has an eternal purpose. That purpose is corporate.
It is interesting that after He speaks this to Moses, shortly after that He gives Moses the vision on the mountain of the house of God, which appears coming down out of heaven from God at the end of the Scriptures: the city. Moses builds the tabernacle, and all this speaks of the Lord’s purpose for a corporate man.
But in those early days, the Lord was gaining a man like you and like me. He revealed Himself as God Almighty, revealing Himself in His utter sovereignty and authority.
Abraham was called before he was in Haran, in Ur of the Chaldeans, when he was about fifty-five years old. Now, after this meeting, if I just stop there and continue on, twenty-five people will come up to me and say, “I looked in the Scripture, and just as I remembered, there is no mention of how old he was when he was in Ur.”
In fact, it is not even mentioned in the Old Testament that he was called in Ur, unless Genesis 12 implies it. But Stephen clears the whole matter up in Acts 7:
The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran.
If he left Haran at seventy-five, how old was he when the Lord appeared to him? If you go to Genesis 15 and consider the four hundred years, and then Exodus 12 and the four hundred thirty years, you realize that the thirty years must have been thirty years backward, when the Lord was speaking to him. There were four hundred years still left; the four hundred thirty years were from his call.
The Lord probably was speaking to him when he was eighty-five, because at eighty-six he had Ishmael. So Abraham was probably called in Ur at fifty-five years old. Now the Lord appeared to him at ninety-nine and said, “I am El Shaddai.”
You see, the revelation that Abraham had of the Lord was something that was continuing and expanding. So it ought to be with us. The Lord’s work in our lives continues from the day that we are saved until the end.
I mentioned Paul a little while ago. Paul was a growing Christian his whole life. I do not know if we think about this or not. Just as James says that Elijah was a man of like nature with us, I would like to declare this morning: Paul was a man like us, with a nature like ours.
He was a Pharisee. Everything that the Lord said categorically about the Pharisees, I think you could probably apply to Paul. The Lord had mercy on him.
Somehow we think that, in all of us, of course, there was no good thing, and the Lord had to come to us. But in this man, because he was the apostle and called by the Lord to do this, perhaps there must have been many good things. There was no good thing in him—no good thing in you, and no good thing in me.
The Lord revealed Himself to Paul and started a process. That is why it took fifteen years to prepare him just to be sent. And while he was an apostle, in this Christian life, he was still growing into it.
I do not think the man who set off for Damascus on the first journey could have written 1 Corinthians 13, which he wrote from Ephesus. He was a growing Christian.
I do not think the man who said, “John Mark is a deserter; he is not going with us,” was exactly the same man who, at the end of his life, said, “When you come, bring Mark, for he is useful to me.”
Is this process of the Lord’s life real in your life and in my life—an ongoing process? Or have we come to a place where we say, “You know, this is comfortable. Maybe we will just dig in here. We have gone far enough. This is good enough.”
Old brothers and sisters, may the Lord appear to us and reveal Himself to us yet again.
Abraham sees the God of glory, and the Lord says to him:
Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee.
And so Abraham leaves his country in perfect obedience, with his father’s house and his relatives, and goes to Haran. There he is for twenty years, waiting.
Then, you know what the Scripture does not say? It does not say, “So the Lord sent leanness to his soul, and put holes in his pockets, and nothing that he did prospered.” No.
It is amazing to me that the two places where it seems Abraham was in the greatest compromise—Haran for all those years, and down in Egypt—are, according to the Scriptures, two places where God blessed him the most physically and outwardly in his life. Is that not strange?
When they came out of Haran and entered the land, they brought all the possessions they had acquired in Haran: male and female servants, flocks, and all sorts of increase the Lord had brought them while they were there waiting for Abraham’s father to die.
After his father died, he left his father’s house, and he took his relative with him. Remember, we are looking at a period of forty-four years in this man’s life. Maybe we can see something of our life in this.
For forty-four years, the Lord appeared to him. He obeyed the Lord in one thing, and the other two were put on hold for twenty years. Now he has gone into the land, and he still has the relative with him.
He goes to Shechem, between Bethel and Ai, and into the Negev. Then the famine comes, Lot with him, and he goes into Egypt.
Perhaps he did not understand how great the Lord was. “I had better go down to Egypt and take care of things there, and make sure that I survive, so that the Lord can bring about all those wonderful things He said that He was going to give me.”
There was a famine in the land. It had never been established in Abraham’s experience whether the Lord could sustain a man and a family—and not just a man, but a great company.
Abraham was a great prince. He was able to bring out from his own house three hundred and eighteen men, born in his own house, and wage war. When you think of the women, the ones who were too young to go out, and the ones too old to go out, this man must have had more than two thousand people. A great prince in the land.
So he goes into Egypt. “Is God able to keep a man in such an ungodly place as Egypt? What happens when they see my wife? Well, listen, you just tell them that you are my sister.” It was half the truth.
So he goes there and tells that half-lie. And of all things, Pharaoh does exactly what Pharaohs do: they see a beautiful woman and put her in the harem.
God’s purpose is now tottering, because Abraham did not know it, but he was to have descendants, and they were to come through Sarah.
The Lord demonstrates something to him: He can take care of His servant in a godless place like Egypt, bring him out intact, and not only intact, but with flocks, camels, livestock, gold, silver, and servants—one servant in particular.
Now, it is interesting. I said the Lord did not curse Abraham in Haran or curse him in Egypt, but, in a way, we do reap the fruit of our mistakes.
Consider: if Abraham had not brought Lot out with him, if Abraham had left his relatives in Haran and come out alone, Lot would never have ended up in Sodom, would never have ended up in that cave with his two daughters, and would never have had a son named Moab, who became a thorn in the side of the Lord’s people.
On the other hand, there never would have been a Moabitess named Ruth. There never would have been Jesse, or David, or any of the descendants of David. Our God is a great God, far above all.
So Abraham comes out, and finally Abraham and Lot separate. Then the Lord appears to him.
There were probably, I am guessing, about three years between this separation and Genesis 15. There were about eleven years from when he was seventy-five and came out of Haran until he was eighty-six and had Ishmael. Then the Lord appeared to him and said, “You are going to have a descendant.”
They came up with a good plan to bring the Lord’s word into fulfillment. It took some years to come through the land, for the famine to come, to go into Egypt, to come out of Egypt, and finally to separate.
Maybe there were three years there, when Abraham could stand triumphantly—perhaps at eighty-two. The Lord had appeared to him twenty-seven years before and said, “Now do these three things.” Abraham could say, “Well, I have come out of my father’s house, I have come away from my relatives, and out of the land of my birth.”
Then the Lord appears to him and says, “Oh, Abraham.” The Lord is revealing more and more to Abraham how great He is. He says in Genesis 15:
Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.
What a precious revelation that is: a shield to Abraham. That must have something to do with the shield of faith. Abraham is the father of all those who believe.
“I am a shield to you,” says the Lord. “And you are going to have a son,” because Abraham was complaining, saying, “Lord, I have no heir.”
This is just a little sidelight: is it not interesting, this great love affair between Abraham and Sarah? A man married to a barren woman for thirty years, when polygamy was the norm of society, and he did not take another wife. He must have really loved her dearly.
He wanted so much to have an heir. He said, “Lord, I have no heir, and Eliezer of Damascus is going to be my heir, one born in my house.” The Lord said, “This man will not be your heir. One who shall come forth from thine own body shall be thine heir.”
So Abraham and Sarah begin thinking, “How can we make the Lord’s word happen? Now we have the vision. The Lord, this great shield to me, is going to give one coming out of my own body.”
Sarah says, “Look, I am barren. Take this woman, Hagar. Take her and have a son through her.” So Abraham does.
For the next thirteen years, Abraham spends time raising this son, absolutely positive that this was the one the Lord wanted. I think of how he perhaps every day saw that boy playing and growing, and said, “Oh, Lord, thank You for this one that You promised. Thank You, Lord.”
He spent thirteen years raising this son.
Let us go back: forty-four years from when the Lord appeared to Abraham until he was ninety-nine. Perhaps three of those years, from eighty-two to eighty-five, were years in which you could not say there was some compromise or something wrong.
Many of those years he was in Haran, compromised a little bit; then with Lot, perhaps less compromise; going down into Egypt, relying on that; the Lord proving Himself and proving His greatness to Abraham.
Now, when Abraham is ninety-nine, the Lord comes to him and says, “I am God Almighty.”
For the first time recorded in Scripture—I do not know whether it happened before then, but it is the first time recorded—he is on his face before the Lord. It is the first time any man is recorded as being on his face before the Lord.
He had known the Lord as the God of glory, in a way, after a fashion. How much he saw, I do not know. He had known the Lord as the One who could take care of him and bring him out of Egypt intact. He had known the Lord who was able to keep him in battle when he brought those men out.
He had some light, gaining more light all the time. “I would not take even a thread or a sandal thong, lest you say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’” He was beginning to see the capacity of this great God.
He became a priest of God Most High. Blessed be Abram of God Most High. You know, there is a difference between God Most High and God Almighty.
God Most High—if He is the Most High, there must be others who have some highness, not nearly as high as our Lord, but some other. If He has great authority, God Most High, there are other authorities. Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.
It is amazing: the living God created a creation, then entered creation as the Highest One, and put you and me in that creation. We begin to know Him and find out that He is the Most High. This is where we live every day.
I had a friend once. He used to fellowship with us years and years ago, perhaps over twenty-five years ago. He was someone for whom life and breath were the Lord’s sovereignty—only he did not see it rightly. He just had some thoughts in his mind.
He was a painting contractor. Of course, he had responsibilities every day. He had legal contracts, places he had to be, and work he had to do. A lot of times he would not get up until three o’clock because he loved to sleep.
We were his brothers, and we were all young guys, and we would say, “What are you doing?” He said, “Well, it was foreordained from the foundation of the world.”
It was amazing how the world was concerned about this man’s sleep. Day after day after day, he almost never got anything done.
Now, if anybody thinks that this man saw with his heart and with revelation the sovereignty of God, that is not what it means. When you see the sovereignty of God—the One who is not merely the Most High, but the One who has all might, all power, and all authority—you fall down on your face and worship.
A holy fear comes into you, because you cannot understand and comprehend. You are beautiful beyond description and too marvelous, too wonderful, for comprehension. This is too wonderful for comprehension. I only know that it is.
That should not cause us to react in some passive way, excusing everything that we do that is not right by saying, “Well, I guess it was the will of God.” Rather, it should bring us to decisions, action, warfare, and following the Lord in every good and proper thing, because He is God Almighty.
Abraham was never the same after he met the Lord in that way, I do not think. This man who took his son, his only son whom he loved, up to that mountain, and could have done it, could not have done so without the Lord revealing Himself to him in this way.
I do not think Jacob could have let Benjamin go with his brothers down to Egypt without the Lord revealing Himself to him in that way.
Jacob said:
Take also your brother, and arise, go again unto the man:
and God Almighty give you mercy before the man,
that he may release unto you your other brother and Benjamin.
And if I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.
A man who would put himself into the hands of the Lord, and act as responsibly as he could, but still look to the Lord—knowing that in his life there had never been a mistake, that the Lord had never somehow fallen asleep while terrible things were happening.
Joseph knew that even when his brothers sold him into slavery and threw him into the pit, when he went from slave to prison, nothing could keep him from what the Lord had determined for him.
He is El Shaddai.
Brothers and sisters, He has called us to Himself. What has happened in our lives, in our assemblies, that would cause us to make a comfortable place and say, “The old is good enough”?
All sorts of things happen in the life of the body of Christ. I said I was talking to the older saints.
Sometimes, just in conversation, people talk about difficulties that come, and people who know sort of smile because it seems that the greatest difficulties that will come your way are from brothers and sisters—from those who were to be a supply to you, your encouragement, and to be built up with you.
Then this happens and that happens among brothers and sisters. Maybe some root of bitterness takes hold, and the progress of building is arrested.
“Look at this. The cause is this brother, this sister, this situation, what those people said. Think of my reputation.” Did you actually think you were going to get out of this whole thing with your reputation intact?
The Lord knows your name. That is enough. He knows your reputation.
But we see the source of things in our lives as men, situations, circumstances, and saints, and do not see the Lord who is over all and in all.
The Lord can take one circumstance and cause it to have an infinite amount of purposes. One thing that happens in this world can affect an infinite amount of possibilities.
This same God can take all the circumstances of this whole world, and time and space, and cause them all to be toward one purpose.
This God, who created the creation and entered it as the Most High, in the same way, and in an even greater way, this whole creation is in Him. He is the Almighty.
He calls us, in whatever condition, after these years—thirty years, forty years, fifty years, twenty years—to let the past remain in the past, to get up and go on with Him, to get back in the race or stay in the race, and to reach out to our brothers and sisters.
Say, “You know, the Lord has not changed His mind. He came to us those years ago and gave us vision and understanding.”
I believe the Lord’s coming is at hand. How much time do we have left? Well, there is probably enough time, but not any time to wait.
When we see the Lord as Almighty, it brings us into a place of complete and utter dependency and submission. That is where it brought Abraham—a man who knew the Lord and followed Him for forty-four years, and then came face to face, one day, with One whom I think was a greater God than he had known before. And he prostrated himself.
It is interesting: at the same time, he said, “Oh, Lord, what about Ishmael?”
Think of those thirteen years of raising that boy, positive that he was on the right track. The Lord had said certain things, so he put certain practices in place, and there he was.
It is possible that where I live, just possible, there might be a little Ishmael about us. Something that we saw from the Lord, and then we hastened to make it happen.
We have this wonderful vision. We see so little. Oh, Lord, we have just seen such a little. How shocked we will all be when we see the Lord in His glory as He really is.
We say, “Oh, thank God that we had this great vision. Oh, Lord, that we would have more vision.” But until we see Him face to face, we see, as Paul said, in a mirror darkly; but then face to face.
We have seen something, and the Lord spoke to us, so then we instituted something. We were just acting according to the word of the Lord, and then perhaps some years later we find out, “You know, that really was not of the Lord.”
It had some earmarks of what the Lord said, but I think He did not build that. Maybe we built that.
The Lord is so faithful, if we will allow Him to come back and reveal things to us that we have become accustomed to and so sure of, and say, with that word—that sharp two-edged sword—“This is of Me, but this was of you,” and be able to bring us into more fullness.
This matter of being a bondslave of the Lord—I do not know exactly Abraham’s posture at the beginning when he was called, but I believe he became the Lord’s bondslave.
When he did, the Lord said, “He is My friend.” Friend of God.
I do not know about you, but there is something in me that finds that thought—being the friend of God—so appealing.
But I think the way to that place is through becoming completely dependent upon Him and completely submitted to Him in love.
He is God Almighty.
Every moment in your life, He knows and knew.
I was speaking to a brother this morning who has a terminal disease. He was speaking in the most wonderful way, saying, “The Lord knew this,” and had given him, allotted to him, his years.
Nothing has befallen him that the Lord did not know about. In the most wonderful way, he is making the time that is left to him so fruitful, so full—such a testimony to the Lord.
I really believe that I am in a room full of people who have seen something of the Lord: seen His house, seen the revelation, seen the body of Christ, seen the holy royal priesthood under the great High Priest, seen the kingdom of God among a group of people, His throne established there in the church, and have responded to that.
Oh, brothers and sisters, in the midst of these years, let us go on. Let us find and explore the grace of this Almighty God together.
Let us not be in a place where we are just going through the motions, where we look back on days gone by and say, “Oh, for those days. We used to really have fellowship then. The Lord used to really build us up in those days. But now it is just amazing.”
I do not want it to be like that where I live and in my life. But the Lord is speaking to me and to you. It is not like, “Okay, we are going to do this,” or, “We are going to do that.” It is me.
If I will know Him in the way He has called me to know Him, submitted to Him in the way and the submission He has called me to, obedient with the obedience He has called me to, dependent—completely and utterly dependent upon Him—
and another does the same thing, and another does the same thing, then there is the house of God in our midst. The Lord will fill that house with glory.
Have you known the Lord for a while, and then someone comes to you and says something like this? Abraham had walked with the Lord for forty-four years, and the Lord Himself came and said, when he was ninety-nine—ninety-nine!
Paul said he was as good as dead. I think if the Lord had revealed Himself to Abraham this way at the very beginning, when he was young, it would not have worked.
Abraham had to go on and discover, year by year and revelation by revelation, just who this One was. He had to make those mistakes. He had to say, “She is my sister,” and lie there. He had to go down to Egypt and lose his wife, then gain her back.
He had to go out to war and find out that the Lord was able to bring him into victory. He had to try to make the word of God come through and then find out he had only produced something after the flesh, and not after the promise of God.
Then, after he had done all this, the Lord, when he was as good as dead—I am speaking to a room of people who are as good as dead, by the way, if you are in Christ Jesus—came to him and said, “I am El Shaddai. Walk before Me, and be blameless.”
The Lord brought him into everything that He promised him, and his son, and his son, with the same revelation.
The Lord has that for us today and all the saints. But, oh, brothers and sisters, as individuals before Him, could we just ask Him for vision?
“Lord, let me see You as the One who has all authority, all might, all power; who has never made a mistake; the One concerning whom the enemy is just Your handmaiden.”
Now, where we live daily, there is warfare. There is rest. But in a greater way than we can understand, He is the Almighty God.
If we see that and settle it in our lives, I believe it will bring us into a place of submission to Him, this precious place of being His love-slave—a servant of love.
The only right response to God Almighty is to be on your face, prostrate. Your life is His.
Then He will build you together with other living stones, and His house will be filled with glory, just as we all saw from the beginning, believed, and struck out after.
Let us pray.
Lord, I ask You, we ask You, that You will take these poor words this morning and add to them, and reveal afresh and anew in our hearts, Lord, in a living way, Your greatness, Lord, Your sovereignty.
Lord, just as those words that we heard last night: aside from the glory of God, everything is vanity.
Draw us to Yourself, Lord, in a way that perhaps we have never known in our lives. Lord, if we have gotten out of the way, bring us back into it and after Yourself.
Lord, we want to complete this course, and we want to run this race to the end. Lord, get us, and do not let us go.
Almighty God, our dear Savior, in Your name we ask.