I guess it’s about time to start. First of all, I want to thank you, especially those who are younger, for being as quiet and attentive as you have.
I know that the things I’ve been sharing—as I said yesterday—I’ve been going the wrong way. The other brothers are sharing simple things on the cross and on the law and all these kinds of things, and here I am diving into the depths, you know, where man should fear to tread.
But you see, the further on you go in the Lord, the simpler it gets, and that’s why I’m still so complicated. But I’m glad you’re here. I hope you can understand some of the things that will be said, and I’m sure some of it will be something to be stored up to understand at a later time.
We all know that the cross, in its work, did a great objective work. When Jesus died on the cross, we were saved—and completely saved. It’s all by His doing. It’s our wonderful salvation, and we have it in the Lord.
Now every day we live in Christ, in the Lord, by His grace, we move toward His likeness and toward perfection. We don’t have to know all of these things we’ll be talking about today in order to enter into the good of it all. All you need to know is the Lord Jesus and hold on to Him like a ski rope as you go plowing through the sojourn of your life, in which you’re going to learn a lot of things.
You’re going to see that you have more faith than you thought you had. You’re also going to see that you’re a worse sinner than you thought you were. And through all of that, you’re going to see in the end that God is more merciful than you ever could believe He is.
We live, even as young Christians, in a tremendous amount of lies and unreality as to who God is and who we are. But the wonderful thing about the work of the cross is that it subjectively works inside of us in our experiences. We come into the truth, and the truth sets us free.
That involves knowing how sinful we are. That involves knowing how merciful God is. That involves knowing a lot about ourselves that you can only learn as you walk with God.
So the Lord Jesus wants you to put your neck in the yoke along with Jesus and learn of Him. He is meek. He is lowly. He is gentle. That’s the way to go through the Christian life. And all these matters of sojourn that we’re looking at in these days—maybe they’ll help you somewhere along the way. But the main thing is to know the Lord.
Now, before we begin today, we want to read some Scriptures, and these Scriptures are going to be from Job at the very end. So if you want, turn to Psalm 1 and then go one page back, and you’re at Job. Job 42—let’s read several verses together.
Then Job answered the Lord, and said,
I know that Thou canst do all things,
And that no purpose of Thine can be thwarted.Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge?
Therefore have I declared that which I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.Hear, now, and I will speak;
I will ask Thee, and do Thou instruct me.I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Wherefore I retract,
And repent in dust and ashes.
Lord, we want to come to You today as we touch on things that are deeper than we understand, and just speak today and then retract everything. Because it’s Your reality that makes our life, and it brings us into fullness.
Oh, help us to comprehend in some measure the ways that You work. But in the end, we know Your ways are higher than our ways, Your thoughts higher than our thoughts, and we cannot attain to them.
We come before You today, a merciful God who nevertheless is holy, and so altogether other, that we feel quite at the end of ourselves as we walk with You. Nevertheless, You have called us on a sojourn by Your own good pleasure, and so we enter in by faith today.
As we walk through the sojourn, oh, teach us Thy ways, O Lord. We ask for the help of the Holy Spirit as we go through this study today, this workshop. Teach us, Lord. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
It’s always a little hard to know. I know that some of you weren’t here yesterday; you’re here today, et cetera, et cetera. But you’ll just have to hang on to the ski rope here.
Today, we’re going to be looking at part three of our sojourn—our sojourn. This is the term for the practical outworking of the cross in our lives that I have been talking about.
The first day we looked at the sojourns of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in order to establish the basic principles of it. And if you’ll remember, these are the seven principles we gleaned from the sojourn of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob:
It’s interesting today that we’ll talk about Job. His sojourn involved him never leaving home, but his home no longer was home after the sojourn began.
The meeting of God gives purpose to our sojourn. We discover that we don’t believe as much as we thought we did about some things, and we have more faith than we realized when it came right down to it at other moments.
The sojourn teaches us the true nature of blessings, namely that God is our blessing. He is that which makes all of our blessings so enjoyable.
Through the sojourn, we see all of our mistakes. It’s very evident in the bright sunlight of the sojourn. Yet we never find God rebuking us or dealing harshly with us—always gently leading, always gently bringing to repentance, always allowing us to start over again. He is a very patient God.
Last time we looked at Joseph, because his sojourn was different from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’s, at least in these two ways. The work of the cross in respect to sin was not so much in view with Joseph.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had to be dealt with regarding their sins and mistakes, but Joseph—we’re not instructed about any mistakes that Joseph made, really. He was a man of God who had a heart for God, and so his sojourn was about perfecting.
The cross not only works to deliver us from sin and flesh and the law, but the cross also works perfection in our lives. Even if we don’t have a problem with sin—and all of us do, of course—but if we’re not habitually caught by sin, there is still a lot of perfecting work to be done. The Lord uses the way of the cross to do that perfecting work.
Joseph went through three great trials on his sojourn unto sonship. Before he ever took the throne in Egypt, he went through these three trials:
All this time, those dreams and the faith he had in God—that God had a purpose for his life—were being tested as he sat in a jail going nowhere. Surely he must have been tested many times.
What do you think about the Apostle Paul, all that time he spent in prison? Do you think he was tested as to what God was doing in his life? How about Watchman Nee for those twenty years or so that he was in prison? What do you think they go through at a time like that?
Joseph was tested and came out after thirteen years. As he explained Pharaoh’s dreams, Pharaoh said, “Then I’m putting you by my throne to administer this famine distribution and everything.”
Joseph had not done anything wrong. He did not deserve all that ill treatment, but God used those suffering years to perfect him in character—to perfect him in humility as a servant, to perfect his gift not to be used for himself.
“I had a dream about me.” But now: “Let me help you. You have a dream? Let me interpret it.” You see, he really was perfected.
Now, as God’s mature son—because we’re talking about the cross leading us to maturity, to sonship, to responsibility—Joseph was sent on a second sojourn, if I could put it that way. Having achieved a measure of maturity, he was called to bring his own brothers to the place of responsibility and sonship.
This cross took on a corporate dimension. It was no longer just about him; it was about his family. And, oh, together as we’re moving toward sonship, there is a lot that the cross has to deal with in us corporately.
So Israel, meeting all the brothers, began its sojourn. They had the sojourn up to Egypt to buy grain, and in this process they were brought into God’s purpose. Joseph’s dreams were realized. The tribe was finally gathered together unto God, together as one, no longer dissipated and estranged.
The brothers were made fit sons through the cross—to be God’s kids, to be the twelve tribes, to be those, especially thinking of Judah, who was such a bad boy, but who through repentance became a lion of Judah, of which even Jesus our Savior has come.
Now we want to look at this third session today, which I’m calling the sojourn through the darkness.
Sometimes the Lord takes His children through the darkness. Now, what do I mean by darkness? I need to make a distinction here so you don’t get this wrong.
There are people, the Bible says, who prefer darkness rather than light. Their ways are evil, and they don’t want the Lord. That is not a sojourn the Lord sets a person on.
Some of you who are here today can testify that you lived in darkness and that you prescribed to the ways of darkness. But that’s not the sojourn. In fact, it’s when you came to Jesus that you came into the light. And as you come into light, you come into Jesus, and there is more and more light as He shows you the truth and you are set free.
But one of the most intriguing, if not mysterious and deep, ways that the cross leads some people is into a sojourn that we can only describe as darkness. It isn’t really darkness, but it is a sojourn that goes so deep that man’s usual understanding no longer applies.
The Lord loved Israel, and we see in Isaiah 43 that the Lord declares His love for Israel but tells them He is going to take them through deep water.
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
And He that formed thee, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee;
I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine.When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned;
Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.
Notice: not if you pass through the waters, but when you pass through the waters. We know that in Israel’s past history they had to go through some waters.
Whom God loves most, sometimes He deals with most deeply. He loved His children Israel, so He said, “I’m taking you through waters. I’m taking you through fire. You’re going to go through some things that are going to be pressure; they’re going to be trouble; they’re going to be trial; they’re going to be suffering. But through them, you’re going to be redeemed.”
Israel was taken through waters in many ways. When you hear that prophecy in Isaiah, you immediately think of the Red Sea. Indeed, they went through the waters and were not covered over. Then He says, “Through the rivers,” and of course you think of the Jordan River.
The Lord also, even now, is taking Israel through deep waters. We have many different opinions about Israel and the state of things right now, but God is dealing with Israel through this matter over there in Lebanon, and with Hamas, and with the trouble she has had.
The Bible talks about a period of time that will be called Jacob’s trouble, which means Israel will always be going through a tough time. Yet it is an amazing fact that though Israel goes through the water and through the fire and through the Holocaust and through this and through that, still Israel is perfected through these things.
This interesting Scripture in Romans 11, where God is talking about His dealings with Israel, makes these two comments:
Behold then the kindness and severity of God:
Toward them that fell, severity;
But toward thee, God’s kindness,
If thou continue in His kindness:
Otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.
Here again, we are seeing that God’s hand takes people through deep water sometimes.
Paul says near the end of his discussion concerning Israel:
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are His judgments,
And His ways past tracing out!
God has deep ways of bringing His children to perfection. They are deeper than we ever could imagine, just as His ways are higher than we could possibly imagine. That is why we have this word unfathomable. It is deep, and God takes His children through these things.
God sends some on a sojourn beyond the mind’s understanding. That is what we are talking about today: the sojourn through darkness, the way of the cross.
Now, you see that says some. I cannot say that every Christian goes through these kinds of things, but there are some whom the Lord takes through for His own reasons.
Mystics refer to this stage of sojourn as “the dark night of the soul.” And really, it is interesting: we are in darkness because the light is so bright. It is like what happens when somebody sticks a flash camera in front of you and suddenly you have black spots.
In the light of God, sometimes we are in a great spiritual light, but our minds do not understand. So when we are talking about going through a sojourn of darkness, what we are talking about is God taking us sometimes in a way that our minds cannot understand.
“What are You doing, God? What are You doing?” How many times Paul the Apostle asked that question? How many times Peter must have asked that question when he saw Jesus hanging on the cross? “God, what are You doing?”
There are things that God does that are so much deeper. Here we come to one of the fundamental points of this whole sojourn: the mind is so limited when it comes to understanding the depths.
God’s ways are higher and deeper. Our minds are so shallow and small. It is only the fancy of man that makes him think his mind is so great.
Man is afflicted with the lust to understand everything, to have answers for everything. Have you ever noticed? No matter what happens, you try to figure it out. “All right, why is this happening now?”
There was a famous song about thirty years ago that Kris Kristofferson sang and made famous on popular radio called “Why Me Lord?” It starts out like this:
Why me, Lord?
What have I ever done?
He is talking about why he has been blessed so much. But usually, when you hear that question asked, it is not about why someone has been blessed so much. Most people say, “Why me, Lord? Why are You doing this to me? Why have You given me this mother and father?”
We ask the question of why we are in the deep pits somehow. We have to have answers. But the fact is, there are some circumstances of tragedy, loss, loneliness, suffering, illness, and costliness for which there are no answers to the mind. People who experience these things go through a sojourn of darkness.
Only as we are dealt with by the cross through the dark sojourn do we come to a place of peace and rest. And how we need this place.
Even servants of God and leaders in churches are all frantic and filled with anxiety—things going on and happening, fightings and everything. We are trying to understand, but we cannot understand. We are in this anxiety because we cannot grip it. We think we do not have control of it, and indeed we do not.
That is when we come to the God whom we have known from the beginning as Father, and lay these things peacefully at His feet. But God has to deal with people before they can do that. We do not lay things down easily.
Especially those dear people who have that Type A personality—they just cannot leave things alone. Always fussing, always dabbling, always questioning, always wondering. They lie down on the bed at night and cannot go to sleep. They are running different equations: “Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know.” They get up in the morning totally exhausted. “What happened to you?” “I was thinking all night.”
Part of this whole reason we sometimes go through a sojourn of darkness is this: God’s holiness is darkness to us.
God is a mystery, and that mystery in the Bible is called holy. That means not only that He is pure in every way, but that He is completely different from anything we have ever conceived of before. When we are relating to Him, we are on shaky ground.
As Job says in one place:
He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass,
And hath set darkness in my paths.
This is exactly the sojourn of darkness that we are talking about. Sometimes God walls us up. We do not know; we cannot go left or right. We do not know what to do, and there is darkness. “What do I do next?” All there is is darkness.
Or Job says:
Wherefore is light given to a man whose way is hid,
And whom God hath hedged in?
And again:
Lo, these are but the outskirts of His ways:
And how small a whisper do we hear of Him!
After talking about the way God does this and this and this, Job says, “But this is just the fringes. This is the foothills of the mountain of the way God does things.”
The greatest minds in the world have only tried to figure out the stuff you can see down here below the clouds. It is a real experience to go up to Seattle, isn’t it? About three days a year, you see this huge mountain, Mount Rainier, just cast up in the background of the city. Such a beautiful thing.
But usually the clouds hang over the thing, and you have to drive up within two miles of it even to see the foothills. You just see a big blob of fog over there most of the year, you know? And so it is with the ways of God. Man’s mind just cannot figure it out. It is too deep.
That is why we have to respect everyone whom God has appointed a sojourn. Every brother and sister who is serving the Lord, who loves the Lord, who is called by God—I am not talking about the passive ones who are wasting time. I am talking about people on a sojourn.
You better be merciful now, or you are going to eat crow later. Respect people who are going through a sojourn, even if you do not understand it, even if you think it is simple, even if you think it is stupid. For that person, it is a sojourn that God is dealing with them through.
To judge others in the sojourn is to be found wrong in the end. Do you want to be like Job’s friends? God showed up and said, “Job, listen to Me.” Then He turned to Job’s friends—bump, bump, bump, bump—just like something from Larry, Moe, and Curly. He said, “You guys are totally wrong. Everything you said was wrong.”
Why would you not be merciful at the beginning and hold back your prescriptions? To compare sojourns—“My sojourn with your sojourn; well, I am going deeper than you,” or, “I have seen more of God than you”—ah, no, no, no. This is to minimize God’s ability to tailor-make a way for everybody through the cross.
In the midst of this sojourn through darkness, the Lord deposits riches. Everybody who goes through a sojourn through darkness comes out on the other side. And when they come out, they have a treasure inside of them that people can see.
Occasionally I talk to some precious Chinese brother who was in a prison camp for twenty years. I say, “Well, what did you do that whole time? Did you preach?” “No.” “Could you read your Bible?” “No.” “What did you do?” “Well, I trusted God. I worked. I ate.”
Twenty years—not much chance to do much. They had some little fellowship here and there. God sent ravens to them just at the desperate time, but they went through. Yet you look at their lives, and there is such a treasure in their lives. How did that happen? Through the darkness.
So we want to look at Job, because he went through the sojourn through darkness, the way of the cross, as we all realize. Job was in the day of the patriarchs, even like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Job sojourned in darkness. The cross was laid upon the servant of God who was perfect. Now, that does not mean he was sinless. We know nobody was sinless save Jesus. But it means he was blameless. It means he did not do things fleshly. It means he had the deep fear of God and a deep desire for holiness.
Notice what is said twice in the introduction to Job:
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job;
And that man was perfect and upright,
And one that feared God, and eschewed evil.
And notice what the Lord Himself said about Job:
Hast thou considered My servant Job,
That there is none like him in the earth,
A perfect and an upright man,
One that feareth God, and escheweth evil?
Why would God pick on the best dude on the earth to take through a sojourn of darkness? He should have taken one of Job’s friends—one of those guys. He should have taken them through just because of their names: Bildad, Zophar. If you have a name like that, you need to go through some kind of sojourn.
But He took Job. Job sojourned in darkness, and of course it is easy for us because we read the Book of Job, and the first two chapters explain everything which Job had no idea was going on.
It turns out there was a great conflict. Satan came and appeared before God, and notice what God did. I mean, I do not know—what do you think about God? Is God kind of mean?
He said, “Hey, Satan, have you looked at My servant down there?” Job had a hedge around him. God put a hedge around him. Job did not want to be seen by Satan. “No thanks. I’m happy. I’ve got my million dollars in the bank. I’ve got a bunch of beautiful kids. I’ve got a nice home. I’m cool.”
Then God starts the whole thing by saying, “Have you seen My servant Job?” Satan said, “Yeah, yeah, let me have him. Let me have him.” And God let him have him.
What kind of a God is this?
The way of darkness: God’s servants are expendable if they can be used to glorify God in life or death. Do you believe that?
Some of God’s servants die; they are martyrs. It seems like such a waste. They glorify God.
But before we get into the darkness so deep that I see depression beginning to move in on some of you like a big cloud, let us start at the end so we get some perspective. I want you to see the end.
Job comes out of the sojourn of darkness and into the marvelous light. Notice what happens at the end. Even as we read at the beginning, he repented before God as he saw God face to face.
And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he prayed for his friends:
And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.
God increased twofold what Job had had before. You know what that means? He had been made His son, because the son is the one given the birthright, the double blessing. He is given the double portion. That means he is a mature son. He has come to a greater perfection and has the double blessing.
But notice: he also has a ministry. He interceded for his friends. God said, “You know what? I’m going to bust the heads off your friends unless you pray for them.”
Job had the grace and the mercy, after all he had been through, to be merciful to his merciless friends. He prayed for them, and it was at that moment that Job was healed and set free.
He came to that moment of greatness in his life where his heart of serving was larger than his desire for vengeance. So God blessed him.
Then we notice that wonderful Scripture in James 5:11 that talks about the end of the Lord in Job’s dealings:
Behold, we call them blessed which endured:
Ye have heard of the patience of Job,
And have seen the end of the Lord,
How that the Lord is full of pity, and merciful.
What is the end of the Lord? That the Lord is very pitiful and of tender mercy. He is compassionate. He is full of mercy.
We have said, through this whole sojourn business, every time you are on a sojourn, you meet the God of mercy. At the end, this God whom we could accuse of being very tough on Job because of this contest in the heavens that he knew nothing about—it turns out that God knew exactly what was going on. He was merciful and compassionate. Job could look back and thank God for the sojourn through the darkness.
But to get to the end, Job had to endure the sojourn of darkness. “He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass; He hath set darkness in my paths.”
This is especially humiliating to a servant of God, or somebody who has known the Lord for a long time. Usually, the sojourn in darkness happens to somebody who has known the Lord for a while. They are going along, people are looking up to them, and suddenly they go through this thing where the darkness comes in and they do not know what is going on. Immediately people begin to judge them and find fault.
You know the story. Job was at home one day, and servants began rushing in, one after another, reporting that his camels had been stolen, his donkeys had been killed, and a whirlwind had come and blown up their house. He basically went bankrupt in one day. His whole life savings, his whole equity built up, was gone in just a moment of time.
Then, if that were not enough, finally a servant came in and said the house collapsed while all his children were together, and they all died.
Suffering the loss of your children is a great trauma. When you go through something like that, you realize just how dark the situation can be.
Job went through the loss of all of his family—almost unbearable—all in just a short period of time. But Job was such a man of God, truly a man of God. This was not shallow stuff. He trusted in God.
Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head,
And fell down upon the ground, and worshipped;
And he said,
Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,
And naked shall I return thither:
The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.
And Satan was put to total shame.
That is quite a loss. You can say, “La, la, la,” about it now because you have not lost anything. Job went through the mill. He stood faithful.
Satan came back and asked permission to touch Job’s body itself. He said, “Well, you give up anything for yourself. Job is a selfish man like all of us. If You touch Job’s body, then he’ll squeal.”
Job was touched with sores that some doctors describe as cancers all over his body, which he scraped with pottery. He was in total agony. His wife at that point told him to curse God and die.
“If you’ve got any shred of pride left in you, curse God and then just die. You’ve lost everything now. Now you’ve lost your health. What good are you? You’d be better off if you were dead than in your situation right now.”
He was broken. He was in agony. Yet he still trusted God. Boy, what a time of darkness. How do you explain this? How do you explain that to your wife?
His wife said, “Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? Curse God, and die.” And he said to her:
Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh.
What? shall we receive good at the hand of God,
And shall we not receive evil?
In all this did not Job sin with his lips. His experience with the Lord was deep.
His friends came to see him. Somehow they were dressed in medieval garb.
When they came, there was an awesome silence for seven days. That was the best thing their friends ever did: to sit there silently with him and weep and groan because of the agony of their friend. Everyone felt Job’s pain—even Bill Clinton.
Then they broke the silence, and Job went deeper into darkness. Job could take catastrophe, pain, and misery, but he could not stand the advice of his friends.
It was his friends that made him lose his cool. It was his friends that provoked him to begin to question and talk and ask and inquire and do all the things that he did in his pain.
God understands people when they are in pain. People say strange things when they are in agony and pain, and God knew that. Do you think God takes seriously somebody who is crying out in agony when they say something wrong, or even something that sounds blasphemous? If you think God is that shallow—“Ah, ah, ah, you said the bad word”—no, God is bigger than that.
Job was in agony because his friends came up to him and began to give him the usual prescriptions. “Go down to the drugstore and do this and that. You’ll be okay in the morning.”
When tragedy strikes, every man becomes a doctor. This is one of my greatest fears: to be at a Chinese conference and get sick. There are nine hundred people at this conference. That means there are eight hundred seventy-five doctors. I am discounting the fact that there are probably twenty-five Caucasians here, but the rest of them have a prescription.
I have had people give me some kind of mugs with the bitterest tea and little things growing out of it, saying, “Here, drink this. It’ll take care of your sore throat.” It almost took care of me.
When Job came down, his friends opened up and began to prescribe everything, and it all gets down to this: “Job, the reason this is happening is because you’re a sinner. And we’re going to find out what the sin is, because you’re also a hypocrite. You look good on the outside, but we notice something wrong—it smells on the inside. We’re going to find it out.”
Everyone’s opinion was wrong, as God says in the end. They made great statements, but their opinions were wrong. And Job’s darkness went deeper.
All Job knew was that somehow God was up there and he was here, and that was all he knew. That was it. In all his protesting, he never said God does not exist. He knew there was something there, but he was in the darkness.
His friends, like all men, had been complicated by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We cannot help but give our opinions.
Eliphaz—he ate peyote. That is what that is right there, from cactus, and he had a hallucination from the tree. Eliphaz claimed he had a vision, and in his vision he saw that Job was sinning against God. And God said, “Wrong. Bad hallucination. Oh, you mystic, you prophet, you revealer of falsehoods.”
That was Eliphaz, taking hallucinogenics and prescribing things.
Bildad ate the lemon tree and had bitter advice. All they did was squeeze lemon juice on the sores, telling him how evil he was, how bad he was, and everything that was going to happen to him because he was hiding his sins.
Zophar ate at the durian tree. This whole lying evaluation stunk with hypocrisy. That is a hypocrite. Here is a man who is a small man. Here is a man who does not know anything of the life Job had with God, and this man is coming to Job and telling him how bad he is.
Zophar was such a hypocrite, he just stank as bad as durian. Have you ever smelled durian? Have you ever smelled ripe durian? Ooh. We have some brothers leading this conference who like durian, and frankly, this is a very dark fruit.
Through it all—all these opinions, all of his talking—God was perfecting patience in Job as he looked above and sought the answers in the darkness of his mind.
Of course, God always has a victorious plan. First, He would shame Satan for his lies and insinuation. Satan was claiming that Job was being bribed, and that is why he was loving God. He was also insinuating that God was a briber, because that was the only way He could get people to love Him.
Can anybody love God if God does not do anything for them? If God is just God, is there anybody who loves God just because He is who He is? Does it always have to be, “We love Him because He has done something for us”? You see, that is the issue.
At the same time Satan was being dealt a deadly blow, because there was found somebody who loved God, God was perfecting Job through this darkness that he could not understand—perfecting his mind, his heart, and his spirit.
This is the deepest kind of perfection that can happen in a person. This is not a dealing with sins in our lives so much as it is a dealing with our mind itself, our heart in its depth, and our spirit.
First: perfecting the mind through the darkness.
The mind in darkness must grasp only one thing. What is that? The servant of God knows nothing until he sees the face of God. That is the issue.
A lot of life is lived on an open plain, but sometimes when things happen that are beyond our understanding, the best thing to happen to the servant of God is to shut up your mouth until God shows up.
Anything before that ends up being wrong. It does not tell the complete truth.
How complicated and dark the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has made our lives. The format of the whole Book of Job—all forty-two chapters—illustrates the problem.
There are three chapters of prose: chapters 1, 2, and 42. In these three chapters, God speaks and things happen. That is the reality.
But then there are thirty-nine chapters of man’s best—thirty-nine poetic chapters. If you look in your Bible, you will see it is all poetry. Man loves to do things in poetry, you see. It is the poetry of agony. He is philosophizing. There is religious speculation. There is science, botany, biology, mythology—everything thrown in. Leviathan is thrown in, whatever that is. Meteorology is thrown in.
Oh, it is a huge, huge poem of life and mystery and everything, which incidentally did no good for Job.
Man is like some kind of wound-up toy. It comes to a situation—wind him up.
I have probably been to at least a thousand men’s leadership meetings. I should get an award for this. I would say, as a whole, we need about eighty-five percent more prayer and eighty-five percent less talking.
We get together in the men’s time, wind this guy up, then this bobblehead over here goes, and all that does not do any good. It does not help any situation. It is just our own thoughts about stuff. After everything, we say, “Well, Lord, we don’t know what on earth we’re doing. You’ve got to help us here.” You should have started there, you know? But no, that is not man.
All of those thirty-nine chapters only caused an agonizing, a thrashing of emotions. If you bring out your emotions and look at them, they get bigger.
If you are afraid, you can handle it. But if you notice your fearfulness, it gets worse. Have you ever noticed that? If you get out on a boat and it is pitching out in the sea, you start to feel a little uncomfortable. But then you start working with the fishing tackle or something and you are okay.
But if you start thinking, “Oh, my stomach. Oh, my stomach. Oh,” even when the boat is still, you are rocking back and forth. You are thinking about it.
So it is with man. He gets his emotions stirred up, gets his mind all stirred up. Man cannot help but write the thirty-nine chapters of poetry. It is inevitable. We have got to do it. That is us.
Unredeemed men are gods to themselves, and they simply must have the answers to make sense out of this darkness. You have got to figure it out.
Have you noticed even chaos now in science has laws? The laws of chaos. Wait a minute—does that make sense to you? Oh, yeah, you see, somebody has already found them: the laws of chaos.
Even meaninglessness is existentially quantified. Existentialists talk about meaninglessness, and they quantify meaninglessness. You quantify meaninglessness?
Even anarchists have rules and mores. Wait a minute. An anarchist has no— You see, this is man. We have got to figure things out.
Here is how God perfects Job’s mind. He comes down in a whirlwind after all of this da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and God does one thing: He asks Job seventy-nine questions he cannot answer.
One way to stop somebody when they think they are smart aleck is to ask them a bunch of stuff they cannot answer.
“Okay, Job, where were you when I created the world? How did I let loose the rains in the sky? How about the moon? Why is it set up?”
“I didn’t study meteorology. I can’t answer that either.”
Seventy-nine: “I don’t know. I don’t know. You got me on that one. No, I’m not sure. Well, I don’t know how.” Seventy-nine questions.
What is the point? Shut up your mouth until I show up. That is the lesson the servant of God needs to learn.
God had a good remedy and an antidote for this. That is why Job said:
I have uttered that which I understood not;
Things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Wherefore I retract,
And repent in dust and ashes.
Brothers and sisters, I am dealing with you. Some of you are going to have to learn this lesson. You know why? Because you are too smart.
Now, you dummies that are here, welcome to the club. But some of you are so smart. You are getting good SATs, you are doing well in college, and you are a thinker. You are going to get trapped in your own darkness until you learn this lesson.
It is a very humbling lesson. What is it? I am a child. Only God knows what He is doing.
Job’s reasonings were silenced. Man cannot know the complete truth about anything until God shows up.
Meanwhile, God discounted the words that were spoken rashly by Job, and God stripped away the darkness from his mind.
I cannot help but imagine what David must have gone through in his own sojourn to come to this point in Psalm 131:
Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty;
Neither do I exercise myself in great matters,
Or in things too wonderful for me.Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul;
Like a weaned child with his mother,
My soul is with me like a weaned child.
There has to come a place where we rest upon God and stop trying to spin our minds over things we cannot figure out. There are dark moments in all of our lives. May the Lord help us.
Secondly—sorry, I have number one there—but number two: perfecting the heart through the darkness.
The perfect heart must trust in the Lord.
Job, through the darkness, had moments of clarity. He said things like this:
He knoweth the way that I take;
When He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him;
Nevertheless I will maintain mine own ways before Him.
Here is Job, even struggling and speaking, agonizing, and God wants to perfect his heart.
The test of the heart came with every one of those tragedies at the beginning of this whole sojourn.
Again, the book itself gives us a clue to God’s dealings, because God goes by the name El Shaddai thirty-one times in this book. That is thirty-one out of the forty-eight times in the whole Old Testament.
If you want to know what El Shaddai means, read the Book of Job. That is where you meet El Shaddai. El Shaddai, in its basic meaning, means the God of the mountain or the God of the breast. The idea is that God is your sufficiency.
Some Jewish scholars today are even saying that God is our mother, and this is what this is talking about: the sufficient One, the One who supplies everything we need.
With every tragedy, the silent test arose to Job’s heart: “Am I enough?”
In one sense, every servant of God is going to be tried about these things. Not all of us will go through what Job went through. Job was a test case, an extreme example. But the lesson needs to be learned by us.
If bankruptcy comes, God says, “Am I enough?” There are some people who so trust in their riches, in their 401(k) and their investments, that they try to take their lives when they lose everything. “Am I enough?” God says.
If you lose a loved one, God says, “Am I enough?” Some people go through a pretty lonely way, and God tests them: “Am I enough?”
Sometimes those closest to you turn against you, even as Job’s wife did, and God says in the midst of that, “Am I enough?” If your health should go, am I enough? If your reputation is ruined, am I enough?
In some way, in your life and mine as we serve the Lord, the question is going to come to us: Is Jesus enough?
We say we love Jesus, but we want Jesus plus blessings. We want Jesus plus a husband. We want Jesus plus prosperity. We want all the things of life—Jesus plus health.
But if those things are pulled from us, even for a season, is Jesus enough? Or do we become the murmuring crowd who finds no satisfaction?
Job, in the silence, passed that test. “Am I enough? Am I El Shaddai? Am I the breast for you? Or do you find your joy in other things?”
Even if we went through the same darkness as Job—which is impossible—even if we went through it, it would not be as dark because we have one thing he did not: the Bible.
Job had no promises. He had no Word of God. He had nothing to hold on to. He had nothing. All he had was a dark understanding that he and God were somehow related through the years. Even though it was completely dark and beyond his mind, all he had to hold on to was somehow to trust in this God.
Now we have the Word of God. How precious the Word of God is.
Isn’t it amazing how people who find themselves persecuted—right now in Saudi Arabia, and a number of Christians in Eritrea, which is in Africa, who are in jail now and being severely persecuted by some fundamentalist Islamists—if you are a relative and you come to them, the one thing they want is, “Please, would you give me a page of the Bible?”
They do not want your chocolate cake. They do not even want a good meal. They are willing to boil the dirty water they are given if you could just give them a page of the Bible—that same Bible that we sometimes do not even read.
“Am I enough?”
Jesus Himself was reduced to just one thing. Even His disciples would run away. He said:
The hour cometh, yea, is now come,
That ye shall be scattered, every man to his own,
And shall leave Me alone:
And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.
Jesus was tested on the way to the cross. Was the Father enough?
Thirdly: perfecting the spirit.
Job saw God and repented of everything. We read these verses, but let us look at them once more. When God showed up, everything in the landscape changed. All the darkness turned to light. Everything made sense.
Hear, now, and I will speak;
I will ask Thee, and do Thou instruct me.
I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Wherefore I retract,
And repent in dust and ashes.
Job had so many questions to ask the Lord. But interestingly, when the Lord showed up, did He answer any of the questions?
It is like the Lord showed up and said, “Are there any questions?” There were no questions.
Our mind will one day be given this choice: “Would you like an answer, or would you like My presence?” Which would you rather have?
It has been twenty years since I lost my oldest son in a car wreck. It was at that moment in my life that the Lord said to me, “Do you want an answer to figure out why, or do you want Me?”
And I took Him.
You see, you will go through times like that. If our mind says, “No, Lord, I want the answer. I want to know. Why did this happen? Why is this going on?” I do not know if He would give us the answer, because you know what? The answer would not satisfy us.
A darkened mind is not satisfied by an answer to the darkened mind. But when God showed up, everything was clear.
What was needed finally in the perfecting process of this sojourn in darkness was this: repentance.
God’s revealing Himself in mercy broke Job’s spirit. God loves those who have a broken and contrite spirit.
Aside from the fact that we should be contrite and we should be broken, let me just tell you something. If you have two people serving God, and you have one who is self-confident and proud and you have one who is broken and contrite, God loves the contrite person.
There is something about the quality of that spirit—that poverty of spirit—that God loves and feels compelled to draw to. If you want the Lord to draw near unto you, you must draw nigh unto Him with a humble heart.
We have this beautiful Psalm 51:
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:
A broken and a contrite heart, O God,
Thou wilt not despise.
Job was, can I put it this way, a perfect servant already. He feared God. He did what was right. He was moral. He raised his family right and all those things. But there was one thing wrong: he was self-confident.
The Lord wanted a servant with a broken and contrite heart.
Here is another Scripture in Isaiah 66. God says, “You know, I made everything. Why are you building a house for Me? My hand made all these things. Thus all these things belong to Me.” Then He declares:
But to this man will I look,
Even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit,
And that trembleth at My word.
God comes to such a person as this: “But to this one I will look.”
Dear brother and sister, in your young Christian life, as you are growing in the Lord, you will find that every time you truly repent, there is a deepening of your relationship to the Lord.
He loves a humble heart. That is not somebody who feigns humility, somebody who fakes humility, but somebody who keeps on learning the lesson in their lives: I must decrease; He must increase.
Job’s spirit was broken and made perfect because God would meet him. Man’s questioning, haughty pride is crucified in the darkness, and the humble servant emerges into the light.
Many times young servants of God are very proud and brash and self-confident. That is why they always get into fights with other servants. All God does is take them into darkness. They are broken. They come back with a different attitude, you see.
Now remember this. We have gone through a deep spot today, gone into the depths of the sea and deeper than our understanding, so let me just resurface now so you do not get the bends.
The sojourn into darkness always comes back into the light.
There is Job now restored and received, and all the people in town saying, “Oh, Job, I was rooting for you all the time. Oh, Job, I just love you. You’re such a wonderful guy—now that you’ve got twice as much money as you had before. Oh, by the way, I need an old Cadillac, and you see your way.”
Job was restored. Now he was an intercessor—a higher level of ministry. His mind was in submission to God. He received all the blessings, twice as much as before, but his eyes were on the Blesser and the God of mercy, the only One he found he ever needed.
Sometimes the Lord has to get us down to that equation. Everything seems lost. Everything seems lost. And the Lord says to us, “Am I enough?”
I know for some of you, probably, you are going through some kind of a sojourn even into darkness that others do not even know about. When they know about it, they may even give you various prescriptions that do not really work.
I am not talking about going into darkness because you have sinned and turned out of the light into the darkness. Although, if you are there, may you come back to the light.
But some of you, even though I do not know you, are probably going through something that is hard to understand. Let me just reassure you: God is a God of mercy. He knows everything about you, and He has a plan to take you out of that darkness, having perfected your heart, your mind, and your spirit a little more with each day you walk in that way.
May the Lord help you and give us all understanding of this matter of the sojourn. We are on the sojourn anyway, so whether you understand it or not, it is still going to take place.
But understand this: the Lord, in His love for all of us, takes us through some difficult times, and it is always for our good. The Lord would never hurt us unnecessarily, nor take us through something that is meaningless.
When we are sojourning with the Lord, He meets us in the way, and we find the great consolation of a life with God, for whatever travails and sojourns we go through.
Now, these are the three things I wanted to share. But I think before we go, let us just have another word of prayer.
I am so thankful, Lord, that much of our lives we live in the light and can praise You and thank You for Your mercies every day—for a new start and refreshing and blessings that we all could count in our lives.
We thank You for our homes, and we thank You for the friends that we have, and we thank You for the provisions that enable us to do amazing things. Indeed, we have been blessed. We want to recognize that You are the God of all blessing, and You are the One who is loving us and caring for us and being so gracious to us.
But, Lord, I pray that You would meddle and strengthen and prepare all of our hearts for those moments we go through a sojourn and the cross lays heavy upon us.
Keep us in remembrance of Your goodness. Help us to trust in Your mercy, even when we do not quite know what is going on.
As we gather sometimes in assemblies that seem to be stuck in the darkness or in a difficult place, oh, Lord, help us all together not to just give some shallow prescriptions of man, but to wait before You until You show up.
We remember how the Psalmist said, “Oh, shine Your countenance upon us, and we will be saved.” It is Your presence we need as we go through the sojourn.
Store up these things in the hearts of Your young ones. Give us all to understand more of this way that we tread.
We thank You that Jesus is the pioneer of the sojourn and has gone before us and shown us the great victory that awaits on the other side, the great perfecting that is done by the sojourn.
Lord, we come and embrace that old rugged cross. We thank You for all that it has done in our lives, and the things that stripped away which we now saw were liabilities all along.
Thank You for the life that You have given us. Oh, Lord, in these last days, as You have us on a sojourn, lead us to the heavenly home and fellowship with You.
Lord, we commit these things into Your hands and thank You in Jesus’ name. Amen.