Good morning, brothers and sisters.
It is a wonderful thing to gather together with people who have that desire to see the Lord in all His worth, His many facets, His life to us.
And for me also, personally, this is a wonderful time. This is my thirtieth year attending the conference. It was that first year, I believe, 1975, when I first came. I came with brothers and sisters from Raleigh, North Carolina, and had no idea what was in store.
But it was at this conference that time stood still for me. I was arrested by the beauty of the Lord in a way I had never heard or understood before. By that time, I had been a Christian ten years and had actually been serving the Lord in a full-time ministry for about seven or eight years.
But when I came, I remember our brother Stephen was sharing on the eternal purpose of God—an unfamiliar theme to me. And our brother Lance was speaking on the principles of fellowship. It was as if time stood still.
My whole ministry was dashed on the rocks at that point. Soon after that, I left the little church I was serving in and had to undergo a revamping. But all those things that used to be gain to me were loss in comparison with the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ.
And it was right here. And He got me.
So I am glad to be here today, now thirty years later. I was out there for twenty of those thirty years, pretty much, and then recently, in latter years, have come up here to share occasionally. But I always feel like I should be sitting out there. There is so much more to gain of Christ, so much more to learn.
But every time we gather like this, to me it is so remedial. It is so refreshing. It is so life-giving. And this family conference has been fresh to me from those days at Randolph-Macon to these days here.
I am just curious: how many of you were here thirty years ago?
Well, now. Most of the people here today were not born thirty years ago, which we are also very happy about. We are very happy that there are those whom the Lord is drawing to Himself right now, and to His tremendous revelation.
We want to read a few verses—our theme verse, and then something from Paul. Both are testimonies of being apprehended afresh by a new revelation of Jesus Christ.
We will begin, I suppose, in Philippians 3. I am sharing on revelation, and then there is realization, then there is responsibility, then there is running the race. So I thought I would jump right over to running the race, just to confuse everybody.
In Philippians 3, you all know these verses so well. This is Paul’s testimony: in prison, and yet absolutely free. In verse 12, we will read a few verses.
Not that I have already obtained it, or have already become perfect, but I press on, so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
And then in Revelation, our theme verses—Revelation 1. We will read just the first three verses.
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His bondservants the things which must soon take place; and He sent and communicated it by His angel to His bondservant John,
who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.
Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near.
In the three times that I have to share, I want to share this time on revelation and time; the next time on revelation and our generation; and then finally, revelation and the New Jerusalem. Hopefully, I will go in that kind of direction.
But before we go any further, could we bow for another word of prayer?
Lord, we want to be seers, not knowers. We want to be blessed in revelation, and not just heavy with knowledge.
We realize that You have a desire to speak to us that exceeds any desire we could have to lay hold of these things. We want to be able to run in this vision through the last days.
We pray that You would give us a heart that is hungry to see more. And even for those who, by the grace of God, have seen much, still to see another angle, another part of the beauty of Christ. Give us vision of the Lord Jesus.
Oh, how we thank You that in this matter we can count upon the Holy Spirit. His desire is to press the reality of the Lord into all of us. O Lord, capture us; lay hold of us afresh, even this week.
Make the message one message, not of several brethren, but of one Spirit. Lord, we want to commit to You now this time that we have together, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I bring these two verses together. There is so much that we could say in starting out, but I just wanted to show these two verses in this relationship.
Here we see two great constraints upon a believer. In John, we see the constraint of time: the time is near. This has an influence upon the work of God, as well as our lives and our priorities—the constraint of time, that the time is near.
But then we see in Paul’s life the constraint of vision. This man who has seen the Lord has been absolutely captured, and now the word that he uses—the word I am calling constraint—is, “I press on.”
There is a pressing on by the grace of God to get to that goal and prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. He is pressing. There is a constraint upon him.
Now, we all know that scripture: “Without a vision the people perish.” But, of course, the reverse is also true: when somebody is really living in vision, there is a constraint upon them. They are not all scattered and dissipated. There is an energy that is economically energized in a particular direction.
And when those of us are in this kind of place, we are sensing the revelation of Jesus Christ upon us. Every time the revelation of Jesus Christ comes to us, it sets us on a course.
Paul—we see in his example, and we will look at it a little bit this morning, and I am sure our brother Lance will probably talk about this some—but if somebody has really come under vision, seen revelation, then not only have they been laid hold of, but they are in the process of laying hold.
It is the grace of God that reveals Himself to us. And when that revelation comes to us, often it comes—as it came to Paul—in such great magnitude that it undoes us.
There is a process of realization in the cross, where we realize that all those things we thought were gain are loss. But somewhere in the process, we are able to forget all those things in the past and find the grace to lay hold of Him who laid hold of us.
Now that is somebody who has a purpose in life. There is somebody who is charging ahead in such a way that God can do His work through them. They are under that constraint of vision.
But here we also see John. You can imagine John on the Isle of Patmos. I am sure he was cut off from the saints for the most part, and his life was lived alone in prayer and intercession. Of course, he was never alone. I know he knew the consolations of fellowship with Christ, even in his suffering.
But oh, what a day—what a blessed day—when the heavens opened and God revealed Christ in yet fresher and deeper ways than John had ever known before. He found himself once again arrested.
You know, that Greek word in Philippians, “lay hold,” is a word that can be used for the arrest of somebody, as in taking them to jail. John, by seeing this revelation from heaven, was newly arrested.
What good news that is for Christians who have been Christians for a while—maybe laid hold of years ago in some initial way, but now, for sure in our generation, needing a new arrest unto purpose.
This is the prayer of my heart: that we would not only be people with revelation, in the sense of receiving that from God, but those who have found the grace to run and to lay hold of that which is before us.
As the Lord is talking to John, He says, “The time is near.” Blessed are those who hear this, who read this, who obey this. Why is that?
Because in this nearness of time, God comes into our time, and that makes all the difference.
Now, I want to talk about this matter of revelation and time this morning, because it is an amazing thing and beyond our comprehension. Eternal matters God has decided to accomplish within the confines of time.
That is an amazing thing. Eternity has to actually come into time, bear its influence, and bring its conclusions to pass. We are in this time where everything is near.
Indeed, God is the God of time. A few weeks ago, we were singing “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” I am not sure even where I was at the time; I get around a bit. But somebody had a hymnbook that included more than the four verses usually sung. Actually, a later brother added some verses to it.
One of the verses that was added was:
Crown Him the Lord of years,
The Potentate of time.
Because I was considering this matter, that arrested me: He is the Potentate of time. He is the One who created time for His purpose.
He has taken history—your biography. He has taken geography. He has taken kingdoms. He has taken conflicts. He has taken time and pressed it into the fulfillment of His eternal purpose.
That is amazing. Only God could do that. It takes an amazing wisdom to take all these temporal things and transform them into eternal things.
But this is the work of God right now: taking your temporal life and my temporal life, transforming it from the corruptible to the incorruptible, from that which is limited to that which is unlimited in Christ Jesus.
So we are in this amazing transformation. No wonder sometimes you are feeling the strain of it. You and I, sometimes it is because we are going into a different time zone.
When John saw this revelation from heaven, he was immediately put in a place which, for most Christians, is unfamiliar: a completely God-centred time zone.
Now John, I think, was quite familiar with a God-centred abiding. But when the revelation of Jesus Christ comes to us, often it catches us out because we are so self-centred.
But the book of Revelation is so God-centred. God’s name, or “Him,” or “Lord,” or “Jesus,” or “Lamb,” are used more than fifty times in this book. It is just all about God, and we come into the picture secondarily.
If we can lay hold of that, it is one of the first secrets of Revelation: we have to come out of ourselves. Truly John came out of himself.
What was his suffering on the Isle of Patmos after he saw the Lord, the Lamb of God, hold the scroll in His hand? What was it after he saw that He was the mighty angel, and that He was the One about to come back as the mighty warrior? What were these little trials on the Isle of Patmos after that?
He was in the God-centred zone. He was in kingdom time.
These eternal matters are pressing themselves into our temporal existence in order to achieve God’s end and His purpose. So revelation is always time-sensitive material. This book of Revelation is time-sensitive material.
I do not know about you, but every week, at least, I get one letter marked, “Time-sensitive material. Please open immediately.” Time-sensitive. SOS written all over it, as our brother Jerry says.
And I open it up, and it says, “You are invited to join a new bank credit-card deal,” or something nonsensical. But you know what? Prophecy is time-sensitive material. The time is near.
I would be so bold as to say that if somebody reads the book of Revelation and does not have a sense of the nearness of the Lord’s return, they will not understand the book.
That statement is throughout the book. The atmosphere of His nearness is necessary to see the revelations in this book.
I have been thinking about time some, so I roamed a bit on the internet just to see what they had to say about time. I found out all kinds of interesting things about time travel and UFOs and many interesting things.
But there were actually a few things that science has been saying, and I have not had my ear really tuned to science. I hit some websites and discovered that time is a very interesting developing study in quantum mechanics and all such kinds of things.
Now, I do not understand scientese. It is a language I have not really learned. But I read these websites, and it was interesting to me—the correspondence of some discoveries of science with the truth of the Word of God.
Just as an example, since the dawn of time, all of us have understood time in its first dimension. By the way, they say now there are three dimensions of time.
But in its first dimension, time is that measured sequence of events, measured in seconds, minutes, years, or centuries. It is just measuring time. It is one-dimensional: time goes by.
It is even pictured in one dimension as a timeline. You can make a timeline about something—just a one-dimensional thing. The illustration of this sense of chronology is the hourglass.
You turn it, and down go the sands of time. There is even a hymn about the sands of time. The sands of time are going through the little neck in the hourglass, and we are near the end. The last sands are pouring through indeed.
Anyway, time in its first dimension is a measurement.
But Einstein did a lot of interesting things. He made everything that we thought was constant variable, and everything we thought was variable constant. He turned the whole thing around.
For science, he opened up minds to intuitive understandings that had never been grasped before his time, and since his time things have developed beyond that.
Now scientists talk very freely, as if it is a certainty, that time not only has this chronological dimension, but time also has a dimension they call the density of time.
By that, they say that when you take matter, space, and time and work them together in an interrelationship, time does not stay constant. It actually thins out or condenses depending on the circumstances of mass and the speed of light and such things.
I am sure you understand all of that. I just take their word for it.
They say that especially when you get near the speed of light, time has this fascinating change. Suddenly, time is not always just time as we know it, but time becomes dense.
It is as if you could take that hourglass and take the neck of it and open it up or close it down with some kind of little diaphragm. Open it up and suddenly sand goes through quickly; close it up and almost no sand goes through. Time has a density to it.
They say, perhaps, even the former uses of stratification in geological rocks and carbon-14 dating are not accurate concerning the dating of the world’s beginning, because there is a possibility that in the early days time was denser.
Things could happen in several years that we would think would take centuries in the usual timeline concepts. Time dense or thin, depending on circumstances.
At least you understand time dense or thin. We often talk about time flying. When you are doing something great—like solitaire on the computer—how time flies!
But we also know time dragging. About one hour into my message, suddenly I see people shaking their watches. “This is really dragging.”
Time can really drag, especially when you are waiting for something. So you can imagine John on the Isle of Patmos, and time is dragging—until God filled the time full.
From a sudden sparseness of events in time and a sense of God’s presence, God came into the picture and absolutely densified time. I do not know if that is a word, so whoever is translating, I will just give you an extra moment.
It is a shame that scientists are not more attached to the Bible, because these truths are old hat for the Bible.
The New Testament uses two words for time. I know you are all familiar with this, but let us retrace it for a moment to get this sense of revelation and time.
The first Greek word is chronos, where we get chronology. Or, you see me—I have a Timex here. It was twenty-nine dollars, and it does not have an alarm on it. It is a great buy. This is a watch.
Some people are wearing a chronograph. Now, that is a watch that costs more than five hundred bucks. It is the same thing: it goes tick-tock, and the thing goes around.
But however you call time, those simple measurements of time—that chronology—it is now 10:15. Or, as we say in New York, where everybody is smarter: the little hand is on ten; the big hand is on three.
There is a chronology to God’s time. This Greek word chronos is used when the writer is talking about some space of time: in three days’ time. Chronos is used. God works in chronos.
We know that the Bible says, “For everything there is a time and a season.” There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to love and a time to hate. There are times in our lives. There is a sequence of time in our lives.
Spiritually speaking, because of God’s faithfulness—He invented chronos—there is a series of events in our lives that begins with salvation, but actually before that:
Whom He foreknew, He called;
whom He called, He justified;
whom He justified, He glorified.
If you want to stick in sanctification, establishment, and building up, we all know this experience in our lives. There is a time of God in everybody’s life.
I am always interested, because I used to work with young people a lot, that every young person who loves the Lord and truly is saved has a sovereign alarm clock.
Some of them, at fifteen years old, that alarm goes off, and they consecrate their lives to the Lord whom they love above all else.
But their very sibling sits around at fifteen, and then the alarm never goes off. At sixteen, you start worrying about this kid. At seventeen, you think there is no alarm clock.
But at nineteen, in college, this kid’s sovereign alarm clock goes off, and they wake up and say, “What am I doing? I belong to Jesus. What am I doing here in the world?” They consecrate themselves to the Lord and move on forward.
Nobody can fiddle with that alarm clock, although parents try all the time. They reset the clock forward all the time.
But God has His chronology. He works in His chronology, and we have to bow before His patience, before His seasons, before His times. We have to pray and wait.
Time can drag, but God is behind time. As the psalmist said, “My times are in Your hand.” You remember how David said that in Psalm 31, when his enemies were attacking him, oppressing him? He said, “God, I put my time in Your hands.”
That is the way of deliverance. But anyway, there is that chronology.
The second Greek word is kairos, which means, to put its spirit in Bible terms, God-filled time, or dense time.
When God is doing something on this earth, we call it today, as a familiar phrase used much in Christendom, “the move of God.” Suddenly God seems to surface and starts to move. Purpose gets dense, time gets dense, and His events become very dense.
Things are happening all the time. When God moves, none can stay His hand. It is a tremendous thing to be part of something where it is God’s time and God is moving, and things are dense with His presence and dense with His time.
The purpose of God can be seen. Even in this book of Revelation, when John saw Jesus Christ high and lifted up, and when he started taking tours up to heaven and seeing all that was about soon to come to pass, I do not know how long this vision took.
When he came back down and started writing it all down, it could have been days. It could have been weeks. I am telling you, in the presence of God, forty days and forty nights of this—when He is speaking and doing His work.
So we have these two types of time. There is the chronology of time, but then there is this dense time where God is alive and where purpose is being fulfilled.
So God works day by day. But who are the ones who sense that denseness of time? According to Revelation, His bondservants.
Who are those people? Do you notice Revelation is given to His bondservants? Anybody can read it, but the others will not get anything out of it. But His bondservants will be blessed because they read it, then they hear it, and then they obey it. So it is very living to them. They are in a different time zone.
Now, who are the bondservants? Oh, well, they are the notable ones. There are three or four or five of them. They all have to have gray hair, just about over the hill. Those are the bondservants.
No, no, no, no, no. Who is a bondservant? Anybody who has been laid hold of and is now laying hold. They can be sixteen years old. They are a bondservant to whom the heavens open, and Jesus reveals more and more and more of Himself.
When we read the story, it is so God-centred. Back in New York, we are studying the book of Genesis right now, and we have been about seven weeks into the life of Abraham.
It is very interesting about this life. Every time he saw more of God, he sort of laid hold of it, and it brought him to a higher position as a prince of God. Then, through various trials and falterings, he would lay hold of another revelation, whether it was El Shaddai, Jehovah-jireh, or El Olam.
Every time he saw God in a new way, it lifted him into a higher dimension of life. He laid hold of these things. This is what happens to these bondservants.
Praise God, I know that there are bondservants here today. They are praying for the Lord’s return. They are the ones around the Lord’s table, as they did in the early centuries of the church, who ended that time together with the Lord by saying, “Maranatha.”
They are the ones who love the Lord’s appearing. They are in this different zone, this place of density and prophetic fullness, because they sense that the Lord is even now at the doors.
Now, is it not interesting that some Christians have no idea how close the Lord is?
I see my time is up.
You know, it is like a bell choir sometimes. Sometimes you speak and so many phones go off. It is an amazing thing. No, no—where was I? Oh, yes.
Those who really love the Lord and long for His appearing seem to be living in a different time zone—a time zone where things are fuller and denser. They are full of purpose.
The Bible even uses this word fullness, because God’s presence is there, and God’s purpose is there, and God’s Word is there. How full is the person who is full of His Word? How full is the person who is full of His Spirit? How full is the person who is full of revelation?
How full is the person who lays hold of everything for which they are laid hold of? This is fullness. This is beauty. This is a Christian living in a completely different time zone.
When you look in the book of Revelation, you see immediately the condensation of time. As an example, in Revelation 12, it says that Satan began to persecute with a vengeance because he knew his time was short.
In the end days, to understand that the time is near is to understand that there is an acceleration in the heavenlies of things happening and transpiring.
There is an acceleration of the enemy’s work, an acceleration of spiritual warfare, and an acceleration of tribulation. These things are true. Jesus said in the Gospels that tribulation will become so dense that God would have to shorten the time or nobody could survive.
That is dense. When you are reading Revelation, sometimes so many things are walloping the people upon this earth that you wonder how they can take it. First this happens, then that happens, then this happens. It is so dense with time.
How we sometimes drift, thinking things will go on just as they are forever. But no, the time is near.
Of course, the point of the book of Revelation is not that the devil is up to heated activity. The point of the book of Revelation is that Jesus is now upon the throne, initiating and fulfilling time with a density never known before.
Do not forget: the seals are loosed by the Lamb of God. It is His time. He has taken hold of it.
When the time is near, it is because it is in Jesus’ hands. He wants His bride, and He wants to bring all of God’s purpose to fulfillment. So He is tearing things open and letting them rip.
He is now in control of time. You can know that when He is in control of time, time becomes dense. Prophecies become dense with meaning.
Now, brothers and sisters, I suppose most people here today are truly Christians. In one sense, we would have to say that everybody who is a Christian has been laid hold of by Christ. It is by His grace.
But there is another sense and experience in which we can say that it is possible to be a Christian, truly saved, baptized, and confessing love for Christ, and yet—as I was anyway—for ten years a Christian, but never laid hold of according to His purpose.
I was doing many things. In fact, my life was quite dense with activity. But let us remember there is a difference between soul-dense activities and spiritually dense activity.
We can be busy, busy, busy, busy. We can take kids to the soccer game, study, go here after school, do this, talk on the phone, and have a busy, busy, busy life. But do not think that is a dense life.
That life may fly by, but to no purpose.
We are talking about somehow coming into the stream of the revelation of what Christ is doing in this day, so that by the grace of God we can be joined to that as we are laying hold of it, and find ourselves in a spiritually dense time.
Let us go to 2 Peter 3 and look at some familiar words. This controversy comes up through some mockers who say, “Yeah, yeah, you talk about the coming of Christ. Everything is just the same as it was in 1929.”
Well, not 1929—that was a market crash—but everything is just going on the same.
In 2 Peter 3:3-4:
Knowing this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts,
and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.”
You know, “Jesus is not coming back.”
The seminary I went to, where I studied for the ministry, did not believe in the literal second coming of Christ. What they believed was that Christ would come by His Spirit being full in the church. That was the coming they were talking about.
That is actually a common view of eschatology for much of the mainline Protestant church today, by the way. It is still the minority viewpoint that Jesus is actually coming back again.
When it came to this matter of Jesus coming back soon, my professor would say, “Oh, ho, ho, ho! Billy Graham? Well, he was just a country boy. He does not understand the finer notes of eschatology, you see.”
Then they would go on and basically say, “All things are remaining as they ever were. Man is getting better and better. The church will come to a great fullness one day when everybody gets saved.”
So we launched forward with evangelism based on that kind of goal, but I think we were missing some points here. Unfortunately, these mockers in 2 Peter 3 are Christian mockers.
Do not be fooled by mockers who say time is only one dimension, just a chronological sequence, and things are always as they have always been. Or those who love Eastern thought and say everything cycles around: what has been will be, and watch out for your karma, because everything that goes around comes around.
That is all Eastern mysticism. It is not godly time.
Joined together with chronology—the time going apace—is that second dimension of time: the time is going to be filled to the density of the glory of God covering the world, His presence. God is moving toward that.
As our brother Jerry shared last night, he actually took quite a bit of steam out of my message. His SOS basically tore up one sheet of my notes. But more importantly, I am glad he did it.
Did Jesus not make that so clear? When He talked about the rapture, in the day of the coming of the Son of Man, what will the times be like? It will be like the times of Noah: get married, make money, have a party.
And Jesus said the coming of the Son of Man will be like in the days of Lot. Everybody was doing business, prospering. “Oh, this time will never change.”
And the density of the coming of the Son of Man is even at the doors. It is shaking, and beginning to shake, all things—not only on the earth, but in the heavens. But there are those just asleep to it.
So they mock and say that time will always be. But when Noah shut the door of the ark, and when Lot moved out of Sodom, the speed and swiftness of the promised judgment came upon them with such density that it caused total destruction.
Here in 2 Peter 3, he shows us a very simple attitude held by those who really believe He is coming very soon. Let us look at 2 Peter 3:11-13.
Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness,
looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat!
But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
I will pass on with this simple comment: those who really sense the nearness of God have two burdens in their heart.
One is that personal desire to live in godliness and true holy conduct—in other words, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s process of transformation and sanctification in our lives.
But then, on a wider basis, we want to be part of that which is hastening the day of God. Not just personal sanctification, but being part of that vigorous drawing together of a bride, that vigorous producing of a kingdom, that vigorous house of God being established, which hastens the day of His coming.
Do you realize the tragedy if you are a Christian who personally is seeking a life of sanctification and devotion to the Lord, but your life is not in the purview of the density of God’s purpose and work being worked out?
It is so tragic to see the history. I have been around for thirty years, spent a lot of time just sitting back and watching the saints, and I report to you that many saints who were laid hold of thirty years ago are still laying hold.
But there have been those who were laid hold of, and every time somebody is truly laid hold of by a revelation of Christ, the enemy comes along and sows your field with so many good things to try to get you to lay hold of self again, lay hold of soulish things again, and become so absorbed in yourself.
Your life, your progress, your finances, your comfort—so that we cannot say with full conviction that some who were laid hold of are still laying hold.
They got sidestepped. They sidestepped in the process. They left their first love. You notice in Revelation, it does not say they lost it; they left it.
When I think of that parable of Jesus, describing the kingdom as a field sown, the one that burdens me the most, as I look over thirty years and watch young people become adults, adults become parents, and parents become older and send their kids off to college, is that too many of them are in that third category.
They were sown into the ground, but there were weeds. There were things that choked out the deceitfulness of riches and the anxieties of this life. It choked out their fruitfulness.
But the whole purpose of being laid hold of is to lay hold. Something got cut off in the process.
How we need to pray. It is never too late for the Lord to redeem years that the locusts have eaten.
How do we live in these end days? When we look at Paul’s life in Philippians, we see some small example of how to live in those days.
Paul was running with a very dense life as a Pharisee. But he was running after righteousness. He was running after God’s approval by the doing of outward works. He was full of all that was in his background and so important to him.
Then God crashed into his life. In that revelation, he counted all those things as loss.
How can a person possibly jettison their past? It is so difficult. Our past—whether past accomplishments, past failures, past sins, or past righteousnesses—we hold on to these things, and they prevent us from really pressing on.
What was so great was that in that initial laying hold, Paul had the grace just to jettison all that past. In that phrase, “forgetting the things which lie behind,” I think he also included even his Christian service accomplishments.
Those victories over Satan and demons, those churches built, those people saved—all that could be racked up to his credit—he threw that aside and said, “No, there is one thing to press after. That supreme knowledge of Christ is the one thing I am after.”
What a laying hold of Him. He was really arrested, was he not? It took him right off his course of self-righteousness and brought him onto a course that was so selfless. It was incredible.
Yet here is a man able to lay hold by the grace of God in such a way because the goal was so clear before him. Look at that goal: the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.
He sees that goal. Nothing can stop you from that goal. As a matter of fact, when he makes the statement in Philippians, he is in jail.
Yet he is living a life—do you not sense the density of Paul’s life? Every word he penned to the saints was breathed on by God in such a way that we read them today.
How dense were his thoughts. How dense were his prayers. How dense were his spiritual battles. How dense was his encouragement. How dense was his preaching.
Even when he was out and free, in the morning he was making tents, in the afternoon he was preaching the gospel, and in the evening he was encouraging the saints. It was full of life.
Did he get exhausted in the trial? No. Because he was not operating out of soul density, but out of spiritual density—that life of God within him.
That is what makes for density of time: the inexhaustible life of God in Paul. Now he is in prison. You would think he would be discouraged, depressed. I am sure he had bouts with all kinds of enemy attacks. But no.
This density of life does not depend on how busy you are, nor how large or small a work you are involved in. It does not have anything to do with success, or even being free.
He was full of Christ—laid hold of by Christ, laying hold of Christ. There is a fullness that cannot be denied.
We see that wonderful testimony of somebody living dense time. I do not think there were too many boring days. There may have been many excruciating days in Paul’s life, but if he had nothing else to do, he just witnessed to the soldiers until they beat him up.
He was always found chasing after the Lord in prayer and intercession.
There are some saints who have been laid hold of by God, and they are laying hold, and now they are in their eighties. What can you do in your eighties? You can live in fullness of time.
There are dear saints who take hold of the Lord and worship. Then, after some time of worship, they have a list of people for whom they are interceding.
I count on that for myself in ministry. I know that it is the faithfulness of people that enables me to say anything of value.
Do not tell me they do not have fullness of time. They can be retired, and they can take their time getting around to it. But when they get that Bible open and worship the Lord, it is real and true and full and dense.
When they pray for somebody, you want them praying for you. Things will turn if they get around to praying for you, because they know God’s mind, they understand God’s heart, and they pray on that basis.
It does not have to do with how young you are or how much energy you have. No, no, no—that is not how we count fullness here.
We remember the Lord Jesus, especially in the Gospel of Mark. When He came to Galilee, it was as if He arrested the whole province. He had Galilee under arrest for three years.
At one point—this was when He was speaking to the Gentiles beyond Galilee—He said to His disciples, “These people have been following and have been with Me three days without food.” That was when He fed the four thousand.
Can you imagine how time stood still in the presence of Jesus as He shared the good news of the kingdom? Three days went by before people even thought about food.
Some of you are already thinking about a snack.
Oh, listen: to be in Jesus’ presence is to be found in a sudden density you cannot believe. Why, the Gospel of Mark has this sort of secret word: “Immediately, immediately, immediately, immediately.”
When the Servant of God came to earth, things were coming. Things were dense. Things were filled. The disciples were absolutely blown away by the things Jesus taught and did.
The time was fulfilled. Jesus’ initial gospel message was, “The time is fulfilled.” The word is kairos. The time is filled.
The things He did not only fulfilled time with the density of His presence and the density of His purpose, but with prophetic density. How precious is the Word of God.
Everything that Jesus did, according to Matthew—almost everything—was, “This was to fulfill this scripture.” Can you imagine living a life where everything you do is fulfilling something stated before you were ever born?
You can live in that kind of density. The one thing that may be the hardest for us to lay hold of is that when He lays hold of us, we are chosen.
We must lay hold of that for which we were chosen. We are chosen for density of time, not for a languishing of years.
But we must be laid hold of—perhaps laid hold of afresh—in these days in order to enter into that.
When Jesus spoke about the kingdom and said that men enter it by violence, I look at those days He spent in Galilee and understand, at least, that violence in terms of time.
Those who would follow Jesus found that He shook up their customs. He shook up their traditions. He shook up their timeline. He shook up their location. He shook up their finances. He shook up their family life. He shook up their prejudices.
To be in the presence of Jesus is a violent experience. When you are laid hold of, it is a violent thing.
I know we are all peace-loving people. We should all be Brazilians. They all love peace—unfortunately, at any cost, perhaps.
We all love peace, but no. This kairos being fulfilled in our midst demands repentance, because He will shake us.
Those disciples did not even know, half the time they said things, that they were saying things wrong. They were shaken to the very core of their understanding and their beliefs. But they were shaken into density of time.
We see these times when God moves, and then, on the outside, externally, we can see God moving in an amazing and quick way. But through the chronology of God’s preparation, He has been working a long time in the hidden place.
Sometimes you are in a season where it seems like endless days. It seems like nothing is happening. But if your heart is in the purpose of God, He is preparing you for something that will surface soon.
Because when God moves, none can stay His hand. When God moves, amazingly, He moves quickly.
I think of the story of Nehemiah. Finally he got the people together, and they decided, “Okay, we are going to build this wall.” Now, can you imagine? I do not know how big the wall around Jerusalem was in those days, but let us say it was a mile long, wide, with four miles of stones piled up, and they were all down to the ground.
Could you imagine how that work must have felt when it first began? Nehemiah said, “This is a great work. Come on, let us build.” They all had a heart to build.
They took the first stone and put it on the first stone. Whew! They looked around and said, “Two million more to go. We are getting nowhere.”
They put another one down, and another one. “This is moving so slow, moving so slow, moving so slow.” But they said, “Okay, we will keep at it.”
Then the enemy came and tried to attack. They said, “No, we are not coming down. We are doing a great work.” Yes, great work—one piece of granite, another piece of granite. What kind of work is this?
They built the whole wall in fifty-two days. When God moves, things are accelerated by His grace and power. But He has to prepare things under the surface.
Our brother Hosea will talk about that realization, that working of the cross. He is not looking for us to do things by our own strength. There has to be a great undoing in order to do His work.
Yet when God moves, what a wonderful and exciting time. You can see it in the book of Acts.
In the church of Jerusalem, what did you see? These people were all blended. Imagine three thousand people, and a lot of them were visitors. A lot of them were Greek-speaking, now living in Hebrew-speaking homes.
Who had a home when forty people were living in it? Is it a home anymore? Who had a meal by themselves? They shared all things in common.
They went down to Solomon’s porch. Some people here are such faithful workers where they work, but they have about two years of days off they can take—sick days.
Everybody in Jerusalem took six days. They went down to Solomon’s porch and listened to the apostles preaching every day. They came back home and gossiped the gospel some more.
Then they ate together and broke bread together. Some people got saved. They prayed for this person, and this miracle happened. Whoa, what a dense time.
But think how it shook them up. No more family, no more Jewish prejudices, no more Hebrew versus Greek, no more home of my own, no more food of my own, no more property of my own. We are all caught up in something beyond ourselves.
It was so selfless. What a picture of people caught in the kairos of time.
It is not that communal living is supposed to be a model for us. What it shows us is that when we have this kind of heart, laying hold, then God can do His work. He cannot do His work in an environment of selfishness.
It is an amazing thing. I know great reward will come to some dear saints we do not even usually speak about in the fellowship.
In every fellowship, there is some dear saint who gives. They prepare meals. They are selfless. They visit.
Then there are a lot of people who are consumers. They sit back. They do not give. They eat. “Thank you very much.” They do not visit, but they like to be visited.
I am telling you, God bless those selfless bondservants, because that is the attitude that God wants to lay hold of in all of us: to have the mind of Jesus, that selfless mind.
That mind desires to gather together, desires to live for the Lord’s sake, and despises nothing of ourselves in the doing. We will talk about that a little more tomorrow.
Just the last dimension of time. Some of you taking notes are wondering, “He only mentioned two.” There is a third, and I would like to finish with just a thought regarding the third.
The third dimension of time that scientists have discovered is what they call time bending, or time warping. This happens when you get toward the speed of light, and time starts to bend.
I read one scientist who said, “If you take a trip around the circumference of a black hole”—which he noted was impossible, since the absolute gravity in the black hole would suck you in—“but nevertheless, if you traveled around the circumference of a black hole at the speed of light, your departure would be your arrival.”
Same moment. The end would be the beginning—same moment.
In other words, time bends up and meets itself at that point of the speed of light, flying around the circumference of a black hole.
Now, I have never been to a black hole. I think I live near one in New York City.
Actually, I think Christian Chen is taking a group on a tour of a black hole this summer. But in any case, he knows all about black holes. If he were here, he would be correcting my science right now.
But the spiritual point is nevertheless valid.
The One who is revealing Himself to John is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. As time now moves toward conclusion and toward the ultimate, the end is becoming the beginning.
All things are angling back to the beginning. We see the garden again. We see man’s original purpose again. What a tremendous thing. Think about that.
All things are being gathered from the past toward a great fulfillment. Many say, “When is that judgment coming?” Judgment is being built up and reserved for the day.
All that is in the past is caught up into the present, and all that is in the future is brought into the present. Then one day God will come down.
When He comes down and creates a new heaven and a new earth, time as we know it will be absolutely transposed into the I AM of eternity.
We will live in a time when the present, the future, and the past are all one. It is impossible for us to understand that.
But at least we can understand that God is the bender of time. Even as He comes down and reveals Himself to you and me, He is bending time to do that.
When He does that, immediately there is a condensing in your life, because He is drawing us toward eternity. God is bending time.
All that He touches, as He bends down in His eternity, is made new. The old is made new. Everything He touches is regenerated.
This is my great hope. I have a prayer burden. I wonder if you would join me in praying during this week that God would move upon us again.
I have a confidence that God is merciful and not only can lay hold of us as He did for some many years ago, but that, for the hastening of His return, He would lay hold of us in a fresh way again.
I do not know exactly how old John was when he wrote the book of Revelation, but he was laid hold of afresh. So can we.
I pray that God would move—move in a visible way upon our lives, bring us to a new freshness of laying hold of that for which we were laid hold of years ago.
And then, of course, also move in such a way as to lay hold in a new, living, and fresh way of those young ones among us for His purpose.
If that does not happen, I do not know what is going to happen with all these Christians today who are saved but do not even understand the lordship of Christ.
I do not understand how their lives cannot end up in loss, except the Holy Spirit, in a sovereign way, lays hold of this generation and shows them it is not about self-gratification and self-fulfilment.
God help us parents. We taught our children that. We need a fresh understanding of what these days are going to be.
I do not think we are going to live in comfort anymore, because things are accelerating too much, and time is bending up in tribulations and problems. Things just will not take an even pace.
Now, I do not know. I do not know.
I saw a news report the other night. Billy Graham had his crusade this weekend in New York, and Brian Williams on NBC News actually interviewed Billy. It was very interesting.
Brian Williams said, “What are you looking forward to?” He said, “I am looking forward to dying. I cannot wait. I cannot wait.”
Brian Williams could not believe what he was saying. He said, “What are you going to ask God when you get there?”
Billy Graham said, “Well, I am going to ask Him about the mystery of death. It is a great mystery. I cannot wait to find out about it.”
You see, he can sense eternity warping in his life. He is ready.
Oh, brothers and sisters, I do not know how much we will accomplish or how much you will do, but I know God has a purpose for you.
He did not lay hold of you to have you just rot somewhere in a chronology of time, where the hourglass is turned upside down and you watch the sand come through.
Surely there is some reason you have been laid hold of. When you find that, you will find out the reason for which you were born.
We are talking about God’s purpose invading our lives. May the Lord help us.
When we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” do we realize all the violence that entails—the violence to our self-life?
How we need His kingdom to come in a fresh and living way so He can move upon this earth. Oh, how we need a moving once again.
I think, in one sense, all of us are like Job. Job certainly loved God and feared God. But at the very end, you know what happened: he came into his purpose.
He came into it by saying:
I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Wherefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
I know that all of us have heard about God’s purpose, and la, la, la—we have heard about God and His greatness, what He is going to do. La, la, la. Have you just heard about it?
When you see Him, it is the most blessed undoing that could ever be.
Oh, may the Lord undo us—our assemblies. May He undo us in such a way as to bring life, purpose, and a clear goal before all the saints.
Let us pray.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Oh God, we know You do not waste Your time giving revelation to us just for us to become thought-dense people. But You lay hold of us with purpose, that we may be Your bondservants, faithful to You, pursuing the goal, with nothing holding us back.
It is Your very presence revealed to us that is our fullness in life. Oh Lord, thank You for my dear, precious brothers and sisters who are here this morning.
So many of them could speak in personal words many of these things that I am only saying in concept. But Lord, we pray: bend the time and come down. Reveal Yourself upon this earth in these last days.
Lay hold of Your chosen ones, that they would be not only chosen, but faithful—the called and chosen.
Oh Lord, we pray: bend the time and come down. Make our time dense with Your presence.
How we thank You for this conference and, over the years, for those dense moments where we sense Your presence and Your reality.
Lord, in these moments, we are constrained to believe that You can return any of us to usefulness. In Your mercy, it is not too late. You are not going to shelve us.
If we will simply come and be laid hold of again, then lay hold of the reason for which we were born.
Oh God, have mercy on us and help us in these days. We do not need more knowledge. We need the density of Your presence, the density of Your purpose, and Your kingdom upon us.
That alone will suit us for these last days. The time is near. We sense it, Lord, in Your presence.
Keep us in those sensations by Your Holy Spirit, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.