Am I on now? Can everybody hear me all right? Everyone hear me?
Well, I just want to begin this morning by testifying and praising the Lord for this weekend. I have personally been blessed, edified, and encouraged by the fellowship, the singing, the prayers, the ministry, and the whole weekend. As far as I’m concerned, it could have just been for me. I’ve been very wonderfully encouraged by being with the brothers and sisters this weekend. It’s just been a wonderful thing.
I know that, for many, it’s been a long weekend, with late nights and travel, and some have long travel to do today. So we’ll ask the Lord to help us this morning. We won’t have a long message this morning; we just have a few things to share. But may the Lord help us.
Can we just have a word of prayer?
Lord, we do just want to commit these next few moments to You, Lord, asking that You strengthen us. Lord, would You give us clear minds, Lord, and hearing ears, and allow us to receive something? Lord, would You bless the words of my mouth and help me, Lord, to deliver the words properly?
Lord, we just want to thank You and praise You. We commit everything to You this morning, Lord. Lord, we do ask that You get much glory for Yourself. Bless Your people, Lord. In Your precious name, we pray. Amen.
If you would turn in your Bibles to that little book of Haggai, the first chapter. It’s on page 1315 if you have the original Chinese Bible, like I did. First chapter, beginning with verse 2. I’ll just read some.
Thus says the Lord of hosts,
“This people says, ‘The time has not come,
even the time for the house of the Lord to be rebuilt.’”Then the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet, saying,
“Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses
while this house lies desolate?”Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts,
“Consider your ways.
You have sown much, but harvest little;
you eat, but there is not enough to be satisfied;
you drink, but there is not enough to become drunk;
you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough;
and he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes.”Thus says the Lord of hosts,
“Consider your ways.
Go up to the mountains, bring wood and rebuild the temple,
that I may be pleased with it and be glorified,” says the Lord.“You look for much, but behold, it comes to little;
when you bring it home, I blow it away. Why?” declares the Lord of hosts.
“Because of My house, which lies desolate,
while each of you runs to his own house.”
And turning in the New Testament, John chapter 14, starting with verse 21:
“He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me;
and he who loves Me shall be loved by My Father,
and I will love him, and will disclose Myself to him.”
Turning the page to John chapter 15, verses 11 and 12:
“These things I have spoken to you,
that My joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be made full.”
I want to read that again:
“These things I have spoken to you,
that My joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be made full.
This is My commandment,
that you love one another,
just as I have loved you.”
And then finally, over to James chapter 5. I’m going to start reading with verse 13.
Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.
Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praises.
Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church,
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord;
and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick,
and the Lord will raise him up,
and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.Therefore, confess your sins to one another,
and pray for one another so that you may be healed.
The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.Elijah was a man with a nature like ours,
and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain,
and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months.
And he prayed again,
and the sky poured rain,
and the earth produced its fruit.
Well, let me put you at ease right away. Some of you are thinking, “I’ve got all these Scriptures now, and I’m going to string this together into a very long message.” As John already mentioned, you’re saved because I have a plane flight that I have to catch. So this will not be a long message, but I did have some things on my heart I wanted to share.
First of all, an interesting, sort of neat little thing happened this weekend. Last Wednesday, I think twenty young people from Memphis, a couple of vanloads caravanning together, all left Memphis on Wednesday morning and started driving up here.
Now, in Memphis, almost all of us live in the same neighborhood. In other words, a good portion of the young people from Memphis who are here either live right next door to me in the house—we have what we call the brothers’ house right next door—or right behind me, where the Weaver family’s backyard comes up to my backyard. Just a few doors down is the Stablin family, and we walk everywhere. We always walk to the meeting. We live so close to each other, and we see each other all the time.
So Wednesday, they left and started to drive up here. I went to the prayer meeting Wednesday night, and when I got home from the prayer meeting, there was a message from one of the sisters telling me that they had all stopped at a hotel in Knoxville and were safely there together. In fact, I called back on the cell phone just to talk to her for a minute and say hi and blah, blah, blah. This is not my daughter; I don’t have any children.
We had all just seen each other. Most of us had seen each other that morning, and now they were in a hotel in Knoxville. The next day, Thursday, John and I flew up here. There were a lot of prayers at the prayer meeting for all the young people from Memphis traveling, and also prayers for John and me because we were flying on USAir.
There was a real possibility that we were going to have to volunteer to be stewardesses on the flight to get home. So we prayed for all this, and then Thursday John and I got on the plane. We flew up here, John Blanchard picked us up, and we got over to this meeting Thursday afternoon.
I walked in, and there were all my friends and the young brothers and sisters from Memphis. We all started hugging each other. Everybody came up to me: “Oh, how was your flight?” We were hugging each other, all glad to see each other—the brothers and the sisters. I was so glad to see them.
Several people who normally don’t pay any attention to me at home came immediately over to me and gave me a hug: “How was the flight?” And everything—blah, blah. I felt the same way.
You know, it’s amazing. Here’s the thing: it’s an amazing thing that when we go somewhere other than home, we’re the same people. We just went to a different place together. For some reason that I can’t fully articulate, it just makes us appreciate each other.
It’s really neat. It’s really fun and neat and rewarding. I mean, it’s kind of a metaphysical blessing. The people you live with and see every day—you go somewhere else, and for some reason it’s different, and you’re just happy to see each other. I love that. The same thing happens when I come to the conference.
I also love to see the guys that I see every day. I see them every day, so I don’t see the changes in their lives. But there are a few people in this room whom I’ve known since they were twelve years old, who are now grown and married. I used to play basketball with them when they were kids, and now they’re grown and married and have their own kids. That’s pretty neat.
So when I see you guys, it’s like a timeline. It really reminds me of how quickly time is going by. In both cases, I’m reminded not to take people for granted.
You know, the Lord’s house suffers, I think, in these days from a couple of things. One, we’re so busy. The other thing is that sometimes we just take the Lord’s people for granted—the very precious thing that the Lord has given us: each other.
Because we’re so close to each other, we take it for granted and forget about each other. That’s one thing. The other thing is, we’re so busy—so busy doing legitimate things, good things, necessary things: talking on cell phones, checking fax machines, getting emails, driving to the office, getting so stressed out, and therefore planning and worrying about our next vacation.
We’re so busy doing things that we don’t pay attention to each other. And that’s a big deal because we’re the body of Christ. I think the real problem, when we’re too busy to pay attention to each other, is that it is a symptom of a greater problem: we’re not paying attention to the Lord.
It’s an amazing thing. The Lord said that He wants His joy in us, and He wants it to be made full. Also, that Scripture in John 14 that we read, where the Lord says that those who love Him, He will disclose Himself to them. He will disclose Himself to those who love Him.
You know what that means? That word for disclose means to intimately reveal and let oneself be known.
We talked a little bit at the conference—both John and I talked about this fact—that you don’t let everybody in the world in on your intimate secrets. You’d be a fool if you did. If you knew a hundred people on a first-name basis, most of them, when they asked you how you were doing, you’d say, “Hi,” and they’d say, “Hi, how are you doing?” “Okay, great. Good to see you. Blah, blah. Right, bye. Let’s have lunch.” “Yeah, sure.”
But as you go up that pyramid of the people you are actually closer to, you share more and more things. When you get to the top of that pyramid—the people you are closest to, and in my case it would be my wife—that’s the person the Lord has given me to share everything with. I mean, we are to become one flesh.
We share everything: all the good stuff and the difficult stuff, everything. I want her to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about her. Not just her, but other people that I love and have great affection for, and that the Lord has given me a special relationship with. There is trust, and we know things about each other.
The Lord has made us in His image. We need to love, and we need to receive love, don’t we? We have the desire to give affection and to receive affection. I think so many times, it’s possible, even for us who have been given so much, to forget about the reality that our Lord wants to be loved.
Being here this weekend with young people, and talking and hobnobbing and having fellowship with old people—old friends. Yes, thank you. It made me think of when I was young—much younger—a long time ago.
Some of us talked about how things seem to be different today with our young people than they were for some of us when we were young. I’ll just briefly tell you that when I was a young person in my twenties, the Lord got hold of me, brought me out of Egypt, and gave me a radical conversion.
I was going on a surfing trip one time, right before I was going to get married, and I went to a Christian bookstore. I didn’t know nothing from nothing, but my eyes fell on a certain book called The Release of the Spirit by Watchman Nee.
I don’t know why I chose that book. Well, yes, I do: the Holy Spirit. I took that book to Barbados for three weeks. I started reading that book, and it changed my life—totally changed my life.
Then I began to meet other people, and guess what? The exact same thing had happened to them. Of course, they had read that book or some other Watchman Nee book, and it totally set us on a course that affected our whole life.
Not only that, the Lord gave us a desire for Him personally. He did. He gave us a love for prayer. We didn’t know anything; we didn’t understand anything. But the Lord gave us zeal for Him personally, a love for Him, and a desire to find out more about Him—not just to gain more head knowledge.
We knew we didn’t know anything, but we were zealous to find out, to have relationship with Him. We also got zeal for His house. Many of us got zeal for this matter of building the Lord’s house.
As many of us met each other and met some older brothers who were radical, many of us became radical Christians. Many of us moved all across the country to be with other people, to pursue building the Lord’s house. We were zealous. We were going to do something, and it was real.
Now, we weren’t very bright, and we made a lot of mistakes—which I regret none of, by the way, because the Lord used them all in my life. There is no bitter pill for me personally or for my wife.
In fact, my wife was younger than many of you in the room when she married me. My wife and I fell in love when she was nineteen years old, and I waited for her to turn twenty so I could marry her. I didn’t want the stigma of being married to a teenager. So as soon as she turned twenty, we got married.
Shortly thereafter, we sold everything we had, moved all the way across the country, and lived with a radical group of people. We had everything in common, and we were trying to be like the first-century Christians. We did all this stuff. Hey, by the way, it was a lot of fun. It was really wonderful and exciting. For me, it was great. I enjoyed it. It was neat.
Now, there were difficulties for sure, and problems. But in the beginning, I’m telling you, we were radical, and it was exciting. It was a lot of fun.
Then something happened. All the brothers saw that the sisters were beautiful, they got married, and they started having children.
Interesting thing: even though I don’t have any children of my own, I’ve lived in homes with other children. I lived in a house with ten people and some babies, who are grown now and have their own babies, and I still know them. I know how to change diapers. I’ve changed lots of diapers.
In fact, it’s kind of fun to meet somebody who is a grown person and doesn’t know you because they were a baby. Somebody says, “Oh, that’s old so-and-so. Do you remember her?” I love to go over to that person and say, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I saw you naked.”
I’m sorry for saying that.
It was no problem to have a baby, and we found out that you can be a radical Christian and have babies. In fact, they’re like dolls. We used to take them to the beach, and you wrap them up so they don’t get sunburned. Somebody has to watch them while the rest of us are out surfing, but you can do anything with a baby. You can put it in the car, and it doesn’t eat too much. This bathroom thing is a little bit of a problem.
But the real problem comes when they start walking. Right? They start pulling things off the shelves. You have to watch them, and they’re all trying to get away. You’ve got a real problem when they start walking.
Another problem happened after this: mama, who loves the Lord with all her heart, got tired. She started getting tired and a little cranky, and that made husband a little cranky and a little tired himself.
Then a real phenomenon happened that had never happened before. After a few years of this, mama wanted to do something we had never done before: she wanted to go out for dinner. So every once in a while, now we’re going out for dinner because she needs a break from all the stuff of the day.
Then another thing happens: all of a sudden, the kid is eating more, he needs more clothes, he needs bigger shoes every week. Things are happening. We start worrying about college.
I didn’t have any of these worries personally. I was just going through it with other people, and I’m that kind of person. If your knee hurts, my knee hurts.
All this stuff starts happening, and to make a long story short, here is what actually happened to us: we woke up one morning, and we had forgotten about the very thing we were pursuing in the first place.
We were so caught up in the needs of this life, so worried about making a living, so concerned with acquiring more things. It was all reasonable stuff, you understand—taking care of our family, providing for our family. It is important to provide for your family.
But we got so caught up in things that we lost our joy. We lost our peace. For many of the brothers and sisters, life became a course of work and activity—not wicked things, but things that were totally justifiable. Only we found our life being choked out of us.
Here’s the interesting thing. For many of us, when we were young, we probably had a little bit of pride. We prided ourselves a little as being those who had come out of Babylon. We were those who read all the Watchman Nee books. We knew Stephen Kaung personally.
We weren’t like other people. We were Christians on the cutting edge a little bit. You know what I mean. We saw ourselves as being people really after the Lord’s purpose, being a remnant like those who had gone before us.
I’ll tell you something: I think that the Lord had really revealed something to us that was real—something on His heart for Himself. But somewhere along the line, we lost sight of what was real. We lost sight of the whole thing.
Many of us lost our joy, lost our peace, and lost our purpose. We forgot the very thing that had set us on this course in the first place.
What we found that we needed was simply to return to our first love—to simply begin to love the Lord, and to confess that we had lost something and that we were not who we thought we were.
You know, I think sometimes some of us have wasted so much time trying to pretend that nothing has been lost. Sometimes in our assemblies, we live in denial. We keep trying to prop things up as if everything is just fine, when it’s not fine.
If we would simply come to the Lord, repent, and say, “Lord, I need You. I need You. I don’t know as much as I thought I did. I don’t have as much vision as I thought I did. I don’t love You as much as I thought I did. Lord, would You give me more love for You? Will You help me?”
I think when we come with that heart, we become spiritually, in a right way, like young people all over again. The Lord begins to bring back that joy and that zeal for His house.
We begin to realize things that were revealed to us many years ago, things that we had forgotten, that somehow slipped away, or that we had even made into a tradition. They begin to come back to us as reality.
We talked a little bit about Jacob this weekend—how he went on his own journey, and how the Lord worked in his life, stopping him in his tracks and making him, as he was dying, a worshiper, leaning on his staff.
Jacob came from being one called of God who lived in his own strength. Through many circumstances and trials, the Lord turned him into one who really knew what it was to worship.
Brothers and sisters, I just have it on my heart that we may not be people who are too busy to build the Lord’s house, that we may not be people who have gone astray on a journey and forgotten the thing that the Lord really had for us in the first place.
It’s always good to ask ourselves a question, kind of like Ed Koch used to do when he was the mayor of New York. I understand he used to go around the streets of New York City and say to people, “Hey, how am I doing?”
Ed Koch, your mayor: “How am I doing?” I guess people told him what they thought. It’s a good thing to ask the Lord, “Lord, how am I doing?”
I’m not talking about being introspective or anything like that. It’s a good thing to be before the Lord and say what David said:
“Lord, is there any hurtful way in me?”
“Lord, is there something in me that’s a problem, that I’m not aware of, that I don’t see very clearly?”
By the way, the nature of things is that when there is a problem, you’re the last one to see it. The brothers and sisters will see it in you before you do, and you’ll see it in them before they do. Ultimately, we need to have the Lord reveal something to us.
Here’s the test. I believe the great test of building the Lord’s house, of maintaining the Lord’s house, of maintaining the testimony, and of maintaining the joy is this command that the Lord gave:
“I command you to love one another.”
And He didn’t stop there:
“Just as I have loved you.”
I really appreciate little things. I appreciate it when I came up here on Thursday afternoon, saw the brothers and sisters, and received a little affection and a little appreciation. I appreciate that so much. It’s a good thing.
I recognize myself: I don’t want to take the brothers and sisters for granted. But it’s very possible that we can take each other for granted.
Do you know what the real issue is when we do that? When I take you for granted, do you know what I’m really doing? I’m taking the Lord for granted. I’m taking the things that the Lord has given me for granted.
That’s really what tradition is. We take real things—in many cases good things, proper things, things that were initiated and originated by the Holy Spirit—but then everybody knows this: we make it a thing. It becomes our thing. It becomes a place to rest on, and it loses its reality. It loses its spiritual edge.
Then it becomes something completely different from what it was intended to be.
When we look at church history—and I have looked at some church history, enough to see that this journey you and I are on, about building the Lord’s house and maintaining a testimony of the headship of the Lord Jesus on the earth—well, looking at church history, it’s impossible, isn’t it?
I mean, we’re like people on a ship launching out to discover a new world, only we happen to know that there have been a thousand ships launched before us and none of them have come back.
Only a few—some gnarly guys washed up on the beach, barely clinging to life on broken pieces of ships, saying, “Don’t go. This is a perilous journey.”
You know what I’m talking about if you’ve read any church history. The Lord gets a group of people, gets a man, reveals something to somebody. Something begins to happen. It’s real. It’s real. It’s glorious, exciting, and wonderful.
And two generations later, where is it? It’s gone. Old names are there. There might be a meeting there, but the reality of the thing is gone.
Then the Lord reveals Himself to somebody else, begins to raise something up, begins to do something. It’s exciting. It’s real. It’s wonderful. One or two generations later, it’s gone. Maybe they have a statue or a building or something, but the spiritual reality is gone.
Well, I’m concerned about this. I am very concerned about this. I’m serious, and I’m more concerned about me in the place where I live than I am about you in the place where you live. I’m being honest. This is a real concern I have about myself.
Not because I’ve seen anything wrong with the place where I live, and not because I’m aware of any problem in the place where I live. But I know this one thing: if I stop loving the brothers and sisters, the testimony will be lost.
It’s so simple. If I lose sacrificial love for the brothers and sisters, the testimony will be lost.
Part of the problem in our organized society—and it’s not just us as Americans; I see this all over the world—maybe it’s a human issue. We just have more technology than most places, although we don’t have as much technology as they have in Japan. They’re way ahead of us.
We have everything so organized. It’s our mentality, isn’t it? Because of business, because of technology, we’re on a fast pace. We’re thinking about how to get everything more and more organized. It’s supposed to simplify our lives, right? The cell phone was supposed to make our lives simpler.
I’m proud to announce that I don’t have a cell phone. I do have a computer that one of John’s sons got at a garage sale and put together for me, so I can receive your emails.
The things that are supposed to simplify our lives have actually made our lives more complicated, haven’t they? They sometimes wind up draining the life out of us.
I was thinking about how there is so much to do—good things and necessary things. I challenge the young people in Memphis with something every few years, because I get a new group of young people every two years. I’ve challenged them with something that is a reality to me. I’ll mention it to you.
I like to have fun as much as the next person. I like to be entertained as much as the next person. But I’d like to offer you something to do.
Some Friday night or Saturday night—and this isn’t just a deal for young people; this is a deal for everybody—when you’re bored, maybe a little loneliness comes in, and you’re dissatisfied with things the way they are, and you start thinking, “I think I’ll go to the movies. I need to get out and go to a concert, or turn on the TV, or do something.”
I’d like to challenge you just one time to try this: say to yourself, “I am not going to do anything. I’m going to turn everything off. I’m going to sit here in silence.”
“I’m going to open the Scripture and say, ‘Lord, will You have fellowship with me?’ Or I’m just going to sit here and pray and have a few words with You, Lord. Or, ‘Lord, can we just have some fellowship together for a little while?’”
I tell you, I believe that if you try that, the Lord will meet you in a way that you did not expect, and your understanding of fellowship with the Holy Spirit will be increased.
The problem with us is that we’ve lost our consciousness—our spiritual, God-consciousness.
You know, this is the thing in the book of Genesis. In the very beginning, you have the Cain line, which we went over with the young people. You have the Cain line: they are inventing things, they are doing things. Then you have the Seth line, the Enosh line—weakness.
You have one line doing everything and inventing things to make life easier and simpler, as man’s ideas. You have another line that is weakness. It says that right after Enosh was born, whose name means weakness, men began to call on the name of the Lord.
Sometimes weakness is the thing that leads to spiritual awareness, isn’t it? The very thing that keeps us in the way.
The reason I read these Scriptures from James was because I was thinking about this yesterday a little bit, and last night. I don’t know what you thought when I read these verses from James:
“Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church,
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord;
and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick,
and the Lord will raise him up;
and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.
Therefore, confess your sins to one another.”
Do you believe that? Don’t anyone answer that. Do you believe that if you confess your sins to someone that you ought to, and if you do that, it could actually have something to do with your healing?
Let me tell you why we don’t do that. First of all, we’re so proud, aren’t we? Oh man, the last thing I want anybody to know is that I’ve got a problem in my life. What will the brothers and sisters think of me? I’ve got an image to hold up here. If people find out I’ve got a problem in my life, I might lose my ministry.
Who do we think we’re fooling? What do we think? Do we think God is a man? He is Spirit. There is nothing hidden from His sight.
Not only that, there is a day coming when He is going to bring into the light everything hidden in darkness. First Corinthians 4:5:
Therefore, brethren, do not go on judging before the time,
but wait until the Lord comes,
who will both bring to light the things hidden in darkness
and reveal the motives of men’s hearts.
Oh, I’m concerned about that. Then each man’s recompense—payment. This is not about salvation. We’re already saved. That’s fine. This is about the judgment seat of Christ, each man’s reward. Salvation is not a reward; it’s a gift.
But the Holy Spirit says that in that day, each man’s recompense will come to him from God. It’s going to be based on the things hidden in darkness and the motives of men’s hearts.
I don’t know the motives of my own heart, but I know this one thing: if I will love the brothers and sisters, and if I will love the Lord, everything will be all right, and I won’t fool myself.
The reason that loving the brothers and sisters and loving the Lord are so attached to each other is because, as our brother said last night, we’re so slippery—we can fool ourselves. I can justify not loving you by the way you treated me. I can justify not confessing my sins to anybody because I think you’re worse than I am. I can justify all sorts of things.
But when I trust the Lord and entrust myself to Him, the bonds of things that have a stronghold in my life are broken.
Some of the people that I respect most are people who come to me in private and confess some sin. It didn’t have anything to do with me; it was some secret thing in their life that I did not know about and would never have known had they not told me.
It wasn’t for my sake that they told me. I didn’t need to know about it. It was between them and the Lord. Do you think it made me disrespect them? Do you think I was shocked?
It made me respect them more because they were violent for themselves. It made me appreciate them more. It made me appreciate the body of Christ more.
We usually don’t read the Scripture about the elders because anointing with oil may cause controversy or something. I don’t know what the practice is in other places. It’s not the elders who heal people, and it’s not the oil that heals people. It’s the prayer offered in faith.
When you go to people whom the Lord has given watch over your soul, and confess something, or ask for prayer for something, or have counsel, or ask to be anointed with oil, do you know what you’re really doing?
It’s not some heavy authority thing. It’s not some strange thing. You’re basically saying to the Lord, “Lord, I trust You. It’s You I trust, Lord. I’m going to humble myself before You. I’m going to do this thing that You’ve given us to do in the body of Christ that brings healing about.”
Brothers and sisters, our physical condition is related in some way to our spiritual life. When we think of everything as human and physical, sometimes we are oblivious to the spiritual life. But actually, the spiritual is the most important thing.
This was a simple word this morning. Really, I just have it on my heart more than anything else. I was reminded this weekend of how good it is to appreciate the brothers and sisters and not take each other for granted.
When I say not taking each other for granted, I’m not trying to be politically correct or something like that. The reason we shouldn’t take each other for granted is because, when we do, we’re taking the Lord for granted.
But when we love the Lord and keep His commandments—and His commandment is that we love one another—if you say you love Him, whom you have not seen, but you don’t love your brother, whom you have seen, you are a liar.
That’s a strong word. If you don’t love your brothers and sisters, you’re a liar. That’s what the Holy Spirit says. Why does He make it so strong? Why does He make it so blunt? Because it is the proof of how I’m doing.
Why does the Lord put me with people who don’t appreciate me and don’t respect me? Why does the Lord put me with people who rub me the wrong way? Why?
It’s so that I can know how I’m really doing, so that I won’t be deceived about myself, so that I won’t be fooled about my own spiritual condition, so that I can see myself as I really am. It’s a mirror.
Just like it was for Jacob when he woke up that morning after working seven years for beautiful Rachel, and woke up the morning after the wedding and realized he had been tricked. He was with Leah, the older sister.
He went to Laban and said, “Why did you do this to me? How could you do this to me?” Laban said, “Oh, it’s just business. It’s just our tradition. The older girl has to be married first. That’s all. Nothing personal.”
Do you know what happened? Do you know what was going on inside Jacob spiritually? Do you know what that’s about? Do you know why the Lord allowed that to happen to Jacob? Because he was seeing himself in a mirror.
That’s what the Lord has done with you and me. He has put us together specifically in His house, in a building process that causes us to see ourselves in a mirror.
May we love one another and thereby prove our love for the Lord. When we do, the Lord will disclose Himself to us, intimately reveal Himself to us, and really, this is the key and the door to building His house and to our zeal for His house being in the right place.
May the Lord build His house in these last days. We are all in that building process. May we be fully engaged.
We all desire to have vision, and we desire for our loved ones to have vision. Let’s encourage one another not just to seek the things, but to seek the Lord and to love Him. The One who is vision will surely bring it to us.
Again, this morning, I just want to testify before you and before the Lord that I have been so encouraged these last few days, so personally blessed, to see the Lord’s people doing business with the Lord. I sense that the Lord’s people have been doing business.
I wasn’t here for all the testimonies and everything, but I had some personal time with people. I sensed, this week, that many of the Lord’s people are in a particular spiritual season.
A season has a beginning and an end, and it is a period of change. I sense that many of the Lord’s people are in a kind of spiritual season. I really believe that many of the brothers and sisters this weekend—not because of the things we shared, but because of the Holy Spirit moving and working—are turning a corner.
They are taking a stand, seeing something, doing business with the Lord, and making a decision. It’s very, very wonderful and encouraging. Nothing could be a greater blessing.
So praise the Lord for all that He is doing and all that He will do. Brothers and sisters, let’s not take each other for granted. Let’s love one another more than we have in the past. May the Lord do all of His work in our lives in these last days.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we do just want to thank You. Praise You, Lord. It’s You who builds Your house. Lord, it’s You who keeps us and who has kept us. You’ve been so faithful to us in these days.
Lord, we just want to give You honor and glory for all that You’ve done. Lord, our testimony is that You’ve been faithful to us, revealing Yourself to us.
Lord, the more we see, the more we want to see. The more we hear from You, the more we want to hear. Lord, give us burning hearts. Cause us to be those who want to run after You and follow You wherever You go.
Lord, get much glory for Yourself. Allow us to be there, Lord, receiving, hearing, recognizing You, just like our brothers on the road to Emmaus. But we do tell You that our hearts are burning within us.
Lord, we love You. We appreciate You. Lord, we bless Your holy name. Amen.