Good morning.
I finally learned from Keane this morning that I have a Gaither boy. He just goes everywhere. So, I’m glad that’s acceptable, though.
I’d like to read a verse or two from 1 Timothy, chapter 1. I’m going to start with verse 3, but the thing I really want us to pay attention to is in verse 4.
As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines,
nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God, which is by faith.
Okay. Let’s turn to the Lord.
Heavenly Father, we just want to thank You that, as we’ve been worshiping You this morning, how good it is to know that we are part of the family of God; that You are our Father, Who provides for us all the things that we need and Who loves us so dearly.
Lord, we just want to continue in that spirit of worship, to say thank You and to praise You for what You’ve done for us in giving us the Savior, the Lord Jesus. How we thank You for Him, Who is our righteousness, Who brings us even now before You blameless and holy.
Lord, we ask this morning that You would speak to us through Your Word, that You would instruct us and call to us the things that You want from us. And then, Lord, in doing that, You would empower us to do Your will. Yes, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You know, Jerry Amon asked me at the Friday-night meeting, “Well, do you have something to say?” And I said, “No,” because if I said anything, I’d have to give my message.
When I was asked to speak—and it’s been a week, since it was supposed to be last week, but you weren’t allowed to come—I think it’s better this way. But I’m not one of those people who says, as the vernacular here is, “Do you have a burden to speak?” I don’t have a burden to speak, so to speak. I don’t understand that.
I’m like a soldier: if you tell me to do something, I’ll do something. So I went before the Lord, and really, I just like to teach stuff out of the Bible. If it was up to me, I’d like to start teaching out of Ephesians.
But as I was thinking, “Well, what am I going to say?” the Lord brought this little verse here. He says in verse 4:
Nor pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God, which is by faith.
A lot of your versions do not say “furthering the administration,” but this little verse caught me. One of the testimonies at the Friday-night meeting was that what we were doing took such a long time. I confess that I would go home and my wife would ask, “Well, what happened?” I would say, “Well, we’re meeting again next week.” And I admit, before you brothers and sisters, I rolled my eyes too.
But considering what the Lord was doing, we’ve been through a lot in the last few years. It is not a matter of saying whether what happened was good or bad, because that really is not the point.
When the Lord takes us as His bride—and He has taken us as His bride—it is just like our vows say: for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer. He has made a commitment to us. If we’ve been sick, He is faithful. If we’ve been poor, He is faithful.
The thing that I see the Lord doing here in our midst in Richmond, even in these last days, is the furtherance of the administration of God. Administration is simply the putting of things in order. The Lord is setting His house in order. He is getting ready for His return.
When I say He is getting His house in order, I do not mean it like we clean up our house and pick things up. It has to do with the order of the house. I am not even saying that it is a matter of putting one person in charge of another person. He is looking, and He is calling for people to respond.
I really believe that is what He is doing. The Lord got hold of us. Instead of trying to figure things out, we had to get hold of the Lord. He is saying, “I just want to get things in order, but I had to get your attention first.”
Now that He has our attention, He is calling. I think in 1 Timothy we have some things He is looking for, and He wants us to respond to them. I do not want to take a lot of time, but I want to share some things that the Lord has shown me—things in which He is talking to me, and maybe He is talking to you too.
In 1 Timothy 1:12, Paul writes:
I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, Who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service.
I think the first thing the Lord is looking for is faithfulness—faithfulness to what He is doing. He is looking for faithfulness in us.
Faithful to what? First of all, one of the things that was on the hearts of the brothers as we started to meet was shepherding. Is the Lord calling us to do things like this? If He is calling us to do something, He is asking us to be faithful.
Even if it is just being faithful in going to meetings. We talked about having these new meetings and new groups, and it can be hard because you are with different people. But if you feel this is what the Lord has for you to do, then the Lord is saying, “Be faithful. Be faithful in going.”
If you are to be a shepherd, then when the Lord lays someone or something on your heart, be faithful and carry out what He is asking you to do.
Another thing is to be faithful to your relationship with Him as an individual. It is hard in this day, with the work schedules that we have, to remain faithful in that relationship. We often talk about quality time, but we need to remain faithful to the relationship, just as we remain faithful to a husband or wife.
Do you make time to communicate with your spouse? I remember my poor wife. I was a bachelor for a long time—I did not get married until I was thirty-two—and basically, I am a quiet and shy person. Not when I teach, but when I am at home, I am pretty quiet. I do not talk a lot.
I would call my friend Jerry, who lived in San Diego, about a hundred miles from where we lived in the Los Angeles area, and I would talk to Jerry. My wife would sit around the corner and listen. I asked her once, “Why do you do that?” She said, “This is the only way I know what you’re thinking.”
Men have a tendency just to be quiet, to clam up. But it is the same way with the Lord. Sometimes we are thinking things—even thinking, “I need to pray,” or, “I need to do this”—but we never bring it to the Lord. We just go on in work mode.
Then we get to the weekend and we are so blown out that all we want to do is veg. But the Lord is saying, “I want you in a relationship with Me, and I want you to be faithful in that relationship. I want to hear you. I want to talk to you. I want to be with you.”
“I do not just want to be with you when you are with the kids, or when you are watching television, or when you are reading a book. I want some time with you. I want you to be faithful. I want you to give Me some time—faithfully give Me some time—because I want to give you Myself in exchange for that. And that is what you need. You need Me.”
The third thing is that He wants us to be faithful in our relationships with one another. But I want to qualify that: our relationships with one another are in Jesus Christ, not in our natural selves.
It is easy to be with people you want to be with because they have the same likes, enjoy the same things, look like you, drive the same car, homeschool together, or carpool together. We set up those relationships naturally.
But the Lord is saying that in Jesus Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, Scythian or barbarian. We could even say there are no public-schoolers or homeschoolers. There is none of that. There is Christ, and we are to know each other after that—after what we are in Jesus Christ, not what we are in the flesh.
If you want to know me after the flesh, you are going to find out that I am very self-centered. You do not want to know me that way. You want to know Christ in me.
When we get together to meet together, we do not just want to know each other in the flesh. We do not want to be like the U.S. Senate—an old boys’ club. Sorry. We want to know each other after the Lord Jesus.
The Lord is saying, “I want you to be faithful in meeting with the brothers and sisters, and I will show you Myself in them. You just have to trust Me for that.”
Secondly, I want to read another verse in chapter 1, beginning with 1 Timothy 1:18:
This command I entrust to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you fight the good fight, keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith.
Fight the good fight according to the prophecies. A lot of times, especially in the seventies for those of you who are my age and had some charismatic experience, there was the ministry of Dick Mills. He would come in and say, “I’ve got a word of the Lord for you, you, you, and you.” Then he would give a Scripture, and it was supposed to be right for you.
You would come to those meetings thinking, “I sure hope the Lord tells me something,” but then you would wonder whether it might be something bad. You were on pins and needles.
Instead of reading your own Bible, you could start looking for somebody to give you a word, tell you what to do, or give a prophecy that you were going to grow up to be a great man of God or a great woman of God. But sometimes we look at prophecies as merely foretellings of things, and that is not so.
When Paul says to the Corinthians, “I would that you all prophesied,” he did not mean that you would all tell the future. He meant that you would all speak the Word of God.
What is the Word of God to us? What are the prophecies that have been given to us? The Lord wants us to fight this good fight—to be Christians in this world—in accordance with the prophecies that He has placed on us.
Lenny referred to one of these prophecies in Ephesians. I want to read Ephesians 1:3-7. This is what God has said about us:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.
In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.
One of the prophecies—one of the things God has spoken to us—is, “I have blessed you with everything that you need, spiritually speaking.” He has chosen us to stand before Him holy and blameless.
I have been thinking about this idea of being chosen. God does not choose like we choose. Some of you who are looking for spouses—are you picky? “Well, I want it to be this way, that way, or the other thing.” My wife was really picky. No, she was. She was not unpicky. I mean, look what she got.
But what I mean is, remember when you were at school and had to line up to be picked for sports? “I’ll take this one.” You knew that person was an athlete. Some people at the end were chosen simply because they were there; they were the last ones, and you had to choose them. That is not what God is after.
It says God has chosen us in Christ. That has really meant something to me lately, because He is not choosing me in the natural man. He is not choosing me because I am big in stature—that should impress a lot of people, don’t you think? He is not choosing me for anything I am naturally, because naturally I deserve hell.
But He has chosen me in Christ. That is all that is acceptable to Him. We may ask, “Why would He choose me?” In 1 Corinthians, it says He has chosen the base things. We are the base things because we are separate from God. But He has chosen us in Him, so that His is the glory.
He is able to complete what He has begun because it is in Christ, not in the natural man. He has chosen us in Christ.
He has predestined us, or given us a destiny, to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the kind intention of His will. This is a prophecy for us. He is saying, “I have chosen you to fulfill this purpose in Christ.” We are to rely on that. That is how we are to live our lives: in reliance on these things that God has spoken.
These are some of the prophecies He has for us. He says that we are to keep faith—keep faith in these things, believe these things, and hold on to them.
Colossians 1:21-23 says:
And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds,
yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach—
if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister.
A lot of us stop there and say, “Hallelujah.” But the rest of our lives, we try to keep this ourselves. We try to be holy and blameless. Yet it says, “If indeed you continue in the faith, firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel.”
You have to hold on to that in faith, because everything that happens for the rest of your life is going to say things against it: “This was not meant for you. This was meant for the super saints.” Brothers and sisters, there are no super saints. They are all like us. They are all made of flesh.
Hold on to what the Lord has prophesied about us. Say, “Lord, I look at myself and I cannot see how it can be done. But You have said that You can complete it. I am going to trust You. I am going to hold on to this, and I am not going to give up that hope, even though I see other things happening in me.”
One of the most beautiful things in Scripture is the prophecy of Balaam. You may say, “Well, Balaam was not too cool a guy. He led the Israelites into sin.” But his prophecies are beautiful.
In Numbers 24, the prophecies of Balaam came after Israel had fallen into sin. They had been murmuring in the desert, saying, “We wish we had gone back to Egypt.” This was toward the end of their thirty-eight years of wandering.
Moses got upset with them and struck the rock twice when water was brought out of the rock. The Lord said, “Moses, now you are not going into the land either.” Then they were murmuring, and the Lord sent snakes. The snakes bit them, and they set up the serpent on the pole.
Then Balak of Moab came to Balaam and said, “Come down here. I want you to curse these people.” You could say, “Right on. Curse them,” because they were not deserving. But listen to Balaam’s prophecy in Numbers 24:
How shall I curse whom God has not cursed?
And how can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced?
The Lord Jesus became the curse for us, and we are to stand in that. When we fall, when we sin, we do not need to lay a foundation afresh every time of repentance from dead works. The exhortation in Hebrews is, “Let us move on from there.”
Trust that when you fall, it has been paid for. That does not mean you are not sorry for it. It does not mean that you do not want to do it again. It does not mean that you should have done it. It means that we have an Advocate, and the price has already been paid.
We are to go, confess, repent, and then move on. That is it. We do not have to lay it all over again: “Oh, if only I had a Savior come.” No, you have a Savior. Trust in Him. Trust in what He has done for you, and move on.
This building has one foundation. They did not put in a foundation for every floor. There is one foundation holding the whole structure. It is a strong foundation, because look at all the weight of this building that is resting on it. But they only had to put in one foundation. Everything else is built on that.
Even in huge high-rise buildings, there is only one foundation. I remember seeing them put in the foundation for a high-rise building in Los Angeles. They dug the hole so deep and filled it with concrete and steel rebar so it could hold the structure.
There is only one foundation. It is not as though Jesus died for these things, but now I have to work out everything else myself. No, brothers and sisters: one foundation. You have to have faith in that. You have to act in faith on that.
It is not a matter of saying, “Well, I do not feel like I am forgiven.” That is okay. You do not have to feel that way. Sometimes you do not feel like you love your kids, you know what I mean? But you do the things that show you love them anyway, even when you do it without a particular feeling.
Because of that, there is blessing. Because of that, there is order. The Lord is not saying we are getting away with something. He is saying, “Come back into order. Come back into Christ. Do not get away from Him.”
That is why it says to keep a good conscience. We have to keep that good conscience, and that foundation has been laid for us so that we can keep it. Christ has died and has risen.
The third thing I would like to share is in 1 Timothy 2:1:
First of all, then, I urge that entreaties, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be made on behalf of all men.
My version does not have it, but most versions say “intercessions.” I want to deal with that word—not merely in the sense of prayer, but with the word intercession itself.
The Greek word for interceding is enteuxis. What it means is seeking the presence and the hearing of God for others. I want to deal first with seeking the presence of God.
When Jerry got up and spoke at that brothers’ meeting, he said that we started out trying to fix things. By “trying to fix things,” I mean going to God and saying, “God, fix this. It is broken.”
Then it turned from saying, “God, fix this,” to saying, “God, where are You?” Seeking His presence, not just seeking the fix.
I want to seek His presence. That is what He is after. He wants us to seek Him for Himself, not merely for what He can do for us. We can be so mercenary.
I confess that sometimes my wife deals with me. She says, “Why don’t you invite your brother out?” My brother is a carpenter, and I would like him to do some work. But see what I just said? It is not, “Mike, come out here. We want you to visit us. We want you to be with us.” Rather, at the slightest opportunity: “Oh, while you are here, why don’t you do this?”
That is the way we are naturally: “What can You do for me?” The Lord is saying, “I want you to seek Me just for seeking Me, just for Me. Come after Me. Do not come after what I can do for you.”
Seek Him to be known so that we can know His ways. We wanted to know what the Lord wanted to do, but we started by asking the wrong way. We came right to the point and said, “Lord, what do we do?” Later, we began simply seeking Him, and all of a sudden He began showing us His way.
Isn’t that interesting? When He got what He wanted from us, He was happy to reveal to us what He wanted. But He wanted our hearts for Him. He did not want merely our heads saying, “Fix it. What do we do?” Instead, He said, “No, no, no. Lay that aside for a minute. Just come to Me.” And so we did.
Intercession means seeking the presence and hearing of God for others. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus gives us that great verse everyone knows: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Before that, He says not to worry about what you are going to wear or what you are going to eat, because the Gentiles worry about that. They feel they do not have those things. They do not have a heavenly Father.
We can get so in tune with what we need: “I need this. I need this.” The Lord says, “I know you need that.” I am not saying that we do not ask for things or ask the Lord to provide. But when we ask, it should be with confidence that the Lord knows those things.
Then we can get beyond ourselves and see what God sees. He wants us beyond ourselves, so that we are not absorbed with, “I have to do this,” or, “I need this.” The Lord is saying, “I know you need that. Come to Me. Ask, knowing that I will provide it. You are My child. Now can you see what I see? Are you seeing other things?”
Intercession is to be made for all people. That does not include only the people in the house of God, though it certainly includes them. It goes beyond that—not only government and government leaders, but all people.
We should pray for the government so that we can live peacefully and practice our godliness in peace. But all people are included in this. The Lord is saying, “Let us get beyond yourself.”
This is the new-covenant people. New-covenant people are those who rely on the Lord. In Jeremiah 31, He says, “I will give them a new heart. I will put My laws on their heart. And their sin I will remember no more.”
Trusting in these things is the new covenant. It is not our working to do something; it is trusting Him for these things. Then, because we trust Him for these things, we can go beyond ourselves because He has taken care of us.
In 1 Timothy 3:1, it says:
It is a trustworthy statement: if any man aspires to the office of overseer, it is a fine work he desires to do.
I use the word desires purposely. Mine says aspires. Some say ambition. I do not think the Lord is after ambition in that sense. The word can also be translated covet, but another Greek word speaks of an inward impulse, without having the object of the desire in view.
The main thing for us to see is this inward impulse. What the Lord is calling forth in us is a desire to serve. Here it speaks of overseers, but that is serving, isn’t it?
Some people will oversee more than others, but the whole point is that the Lord is seeking in us a desire to serve Him. This desire to serve can only come when you are comfortable that the Lord has taken care of you.
That is what a bondservant was. If you read Exodus and Deuteronomy about the bondservant, he comes and says, “Look at what has been provided for me while I have been here. The master has taken care of me. I am not in want anymore. Why should I want to go out? This is too good.”
Because of this, we begin to love our Master, because our Master loves us. We can only have a desire to serve when we begin to realize that He loves us. Otherwise, service is something I have to do. It is a duty.
Service in the house of God is not a duty in that sense. It comes out of a desire to serve Him, and that desire comes out of His love for us—for you personally and for the house of God corporately.
When we realize that we are free in Christ, instead of looking for other ways to go, we begin saying, “Lord, I want to stay here. This is too good to be true. I want to be in Your house.”
Sometimes service in this house means going outside the house. It is like the parable of the man with the wedding feast. He said, “Go out into the highways and byways. There is more room in My house. I want people to fill this up.”
He sends His servants out because they have that desire that has come out of His love, returning to Him through them. Some of us are evangelists. As it says in Ephesians 4, He gave some as evangelists; He gave some as shepherds, pastor-teachers, and teachers.
The desire to serve must come out of our confidence in His love for us.
In 1 Timothy 4:6, Paul says:
In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following.
Another thing He wants is for us to be nourished by the Word of God. This word can also mean nurtured. We can say, “I love these teachings about the church. I know them, and I cling to them.” But if you are not nourished by them—if they do not get into your vitals—then they are of no use.
You know what happens with food that does not go into your vitals, that the body does not digest: it is eliminated. You can choose your way of being eliminated, but that is what happens. It is of no use. The only thing it can do is give you indigestion.
What the Lord wants is for that food, that Word you have been listening to and that has been spoken to you, to be assimilated. We have heard how the house of God should be. The Lord says, “Yes, I told you and told you, but you have missed something.”
If this is how it is supposed to be, you are supposed to be in it. You are not supposed to be outside judging how it should be. You are supposed to be a part of what is going on. That means it is not merely head knowledge. It means you have to get dirty.
You have to be nourished, nurtured, and trained by it. If it means you jump in the water, then you jump in the water. You learn to swim.
It is not like the joke about the rabbi who puts his child on the mantle and says, “Jump.” The child is afraid, but the father says, “Come on, jump. I am your dad.” The child jumps, and he lets the child fall, saying, “Don’t trust anybody.”
It is not like that. When the Lord tells you to jump into something, saying, “I have called you for this,” He is saying, “I am going to be there with you.” There is a transforming work that goes on.
You see little babies, and all they do is drink milk. But have you noticed how all of a sudden they get stronger? At the beginning, when you hold a baby, their heads just cannot hold themselves up. You have to support the head.
But by feeding on that milk, the neck muscles begin to strengthen. Pretty soon, the child can hold up his head. That is a big thing. Then they can sit up. It may not seem like much to us because we are adults, but when you first have children, everything is amazing.
These children grow as they do because they have been nourished. It is the same thing for us. That is a picture for us: to be nourished and strengthened in the inner man, not merely the outer man or our minds.
The mind needs to be transformed and renewed by the Word, so that we think as God would have us think. That is how we are nourished. We have to be nourished, nurtured, and trained.
We are in the information age, where we have all this information. I love it when kids write a report and you know it has been copied right out of the book. You ask, “Where is the answer to that?” They expect you to find it because you are the teacher.
You can give an essay question, and they write what they have memorized from a book. But you ask, “Where is the answer in that?” I am trying to find out whether you know it.
It is like a word problem. You know how things are supposed to work, and then they give you a word problem. Didn’t you hate those as kids? You have to figure out whether you are adding, dividing, subtracting, or whatever it is. You have to have a real-life situation for it.
It is the same with us. We have not been given these things merely to say we know them. We are to put them into practice, to put them into action. We should be seeking, “Lord, help us to put these things in Ephesians into practice, so that we are growing as a body, nurtured and helping each other as we go on.”
The last verse from 1 Timothy is 1 Timothy 6:11-12:
But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness.
Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
This is not saying to take these as separate individual items and pursue them. That is our tendency. We want to categorize and say, “Okay, today I am seeking after righteousness. Tomorrow will be gentleness, so I do not have to be gentle with my children until tomorrow.”
But all these things are part of this eternal life that you are supposed to lay hold of. How are you supposed to pursue that eternal life? Sometimes when we think of pursuing, we imagine chasing after something that we will never catch.
No. We pursue it by being yoked to the Lord. The Lord says, “Take My yoke and learn of Me.” When He says, “Learn of Me,” He does not mean merely learn things about Him.
When He turns this way and has you in the yoke with Him, He walks you down the path where righteousness is. Suddenly righteousness has to be practiced by you in some way. It is not simply a matter of saying, “You do it.” You are coming along with Him.
It is the Holy Spirit living in you. It is knowing that the Spirit is living in you and paying attention to Him. As you feed on Him, He is supposed to lead you.
That is why Thessalonians says, “Do not quench the Spirit.” When you quench the Spirit, suddenly the yoke falls off, and you are free—you are on your own. A lot of times we think we want to be free from that yoke, but in reality, that is not what we want.
What did George Matheson say in that hymn? “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free; force me to render up my sword.” It is a wonderful hymn.
Why do men and women desire to be married? It is not because we want to wear the ball and chain. That is not what we desire. We desire to share life.
Being yoked is sharing life. It is His life in exchange for yours. This is the cross. This is the laying down of your life in a practical way. When you are going one way and you feel the Lord saying, “Do not do that,” you back down and say, “Okay, I will not.”
It is not gritting your teeth. All of a sudden, it is finding the Lord living in you and through you. The people touched by you are not actually touched by you, but by the Lord Jesus.
Some people will say, “That cannot be Jim. That had to be the Lord.” People who know you after the flesh will be amazed. You are yoked to the Lord, and that leads us to laying hold of that life. That is what the Lord is calling us to.
What is the whole end that God is after? This is what I am going to close with. The furtherance of the administration of God is to be manifested. That is a corporate “us.”
Alan Alloway, where are you? Alan, you gave that message on “you all.” What a wonderful thing that is, because this is what the Lord is after. It is not merely individuals. It is individuals who become a body.
Yes, He saves us individually, but He saves the body too. What does it mean that He wants it to be manifested?
I read this in 1 Kings 10, the first ten verses, and it really blessed me:
Now when the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with difficult questions.
So she came to Jerusalem with a very large retinue, with camels carrying spices and very much gold and precious stones.
When she came to Solomon, she spoke with him about all that was in her heart.
Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was hidden from the king which he did not explain to her.
When the queen of Sheba perceived all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built,
the food of his table, the seating of his servants, the attendance of his waiters and their attire, his cupbearers, and his stairway by which he went up to the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her.
Then she said to the king, “It was a true report which I heard in my own land about your words and your wisdom.
Nevertheless, I did not believe the reports until I came and my eyes had seen it.
And behold, the half was not told me. You exceed in wisdom and prosperity the report which I heard.
How blessed are your men, how blessed are these your servants who stand before you continually and hear your wisdom.
Blessed be the Lord your God, Who delighted in you to set you on the throne of Israel; because the Lord loved Israel forever, therefore He made you king, to do justice and righteousness.”
Did you get the picture there? It was not merely that she heard him answer questions, as if she went and played Jeopardy with him. Then she says, “I looked around me, and I saw your servants, and it blew me away.”
The attendance of the waiters does not merely mean that the waiters were there. They were attending. They were serving. When she saw the serving, how they were attired, and how they handled themselves, she was without breath.
That is what the Lord wants everyone to see. We sometimes think that Jesus is in heaven and everyone is going to see Jesus as the One we saw here on earth. That is not it, brothers and sisters.
It is going to be Him in His mystical, glorious body, which is the church. That is what is going to blow everybody’s mind.
People have read about Jesus in the Scriptures. They have said He is either a good teacher, or they want nothing to do with Him, or they have believed on Him as Savior. But when they see Him in His body, they are going to be blown away. They are going to fall down to worship.
Tacitus or Pliny the Younger wrote about Christians, “See how they love one another.” If we go back to 1 Timothy 1, after verse 4, it says that the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a sincere faith.
The Lord is not after merely individual people. Yes, He is after you individually, but much more, He wants you individually so that you may take your place within the body.
Some of us may say, “Well, we do not know how to function.” Gee whiz, be faithful in going to places where Christians are. You will find out how to function. It is not as though there is a book that says, “Here is how to function. Read it and do it.” It is life.
There are no manuals for life. There is the experience of life. There are words that lead you to life. Then there is trusting in those words, walking out in faith, and finding out that He is worthy and trustworthy.
God wills for us here in Richmond that we all be responsible brothers and sisters. He is not saying that only ten of you are going to be the head honchos. He does not want labels. He wants responsible brothers and sisters.
That is what He is after. He is looking for that in us. He wants to raise that up in us so that we are all caring for one another. We are not talking about lording over one another.
A lot of times we think that elders are those who lord over others. No. They are those who care. That is what an overseer is: those who care.
Some of us may think, “I am too old to do this anymore,” or, “I have blown it too much.” But Peter was called about three times.
The first time was when Andrew and John went and got him and brought him to the Lord. That is when he was saved. The second time, he was out in the boat, and the Lord called him out of his business. He said, “I know you are busy with your fishing, but I want you to follow Me.” Peter followed Him and came into a relationship.
Then the third time, Peter had gone back to his old business. Remember, after the Lord rose again, he was out fishing. He saw the Lord, and the Lord gave him another charge: “I am calling you. Take care of My sheep.”
Take care of what is around you. Some of us may think of the whole assembly, but for some of us, it is taking care of our own family. That is the Lord’s charge to you: be responsible in that.
For some of us, it may be in a home group. For some of us, it may be all the groups. But what does that matter, as long as we are responsible for what the Lord has given us and let the Lord raise up what He wants to raise up?
We have the knowledge. We have heard all the ministry about these things. It is no longer a question merely of seeing things. It is now a question of laying down our lives.
In laying down our lives, we find that we are empowered by the Lord to do His will. That is what it is all about.
So let us commit these things to the Lord, shall we?
Heavenly Father, how we thank You that You love us the way You do. Oh, man, we are so glad that You do. We are so glad that, like our wedding vows, You have taken us for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.
You have taken us the way that we are, but You put us into Christ. Oh, Lord, we thank You for that. We thank You that we are in Christ.
Lord, we want to be a part—an active part—of the body that You put us into. Lord, we know we are a part, but we want to be an active part.
So we come to present ourselves to You this morning and say, “Oh, Lord, here we are. Take us as we are. Take us into Your will as we are. Then may it be according to Your will, whatever becomes of us. Let it be according to Your will.” For this is in Jesus’ name. Amen.