Well, right now I think of it.
David wrote that hymn which begins, “I love You, O Lord, my strength.” O Lord, we love You, and You are our strength. We do ask for all these things that we have mentioned. Lord, we are needy, but You have everything to meet our need.
Lord, I do again want to ask You for breath, for strengthening, and for more anointing to speak Your words just as You would have me speak them. Jesus, let Your presence be here with us and not in the parking lot. Amen.
I tried to get some better aids with these glasses so they could go like this or go like this. I do not have any hair, and every time I feel like I used to, they just go sailing through there.
This afternoon, our topic is warfare and the love of the Lord’s coming. I would like to turn with you right off the bat to 2 Timothy.
Paul’s last epistle to Timothy, that we know of, was written at the end of his course. He had lost so many co-workers. Some had turned away—some trusted ones, very trusted ones, who had been with him and gone place to place.
In 2 Timothy 4:7, he says:
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith;
henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give to me at that day;
and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved His appearing.
There is something about a brother or sister loving the Lord’s appearing that helps bring us to fullness. Our relationship to that one thing—there are a lot of other things too—but Paul takes time to mention this.
You always think, “Oh, my brother, with all the things that you have been through, all that you have accomplished, and all that you have done, how could something as trivial as, ‘Oh, and I really love the Lord’s appearing,’ be mentioned with having kept the faith, run the course, and fought the good fight?” How could that be mentioned with those other things?
And yet it is. It is linked in such a way that we have warfare with the enemy over the very fact of the Lord’s coming. I keep looking at the front door, hoping that the last person, every time—it is working out so far—will have closed it, because there is something we have right now that is valuable that we do not want to lose: this cool air.
Something is so valuable to our coming to full stature—loving His appearing—that the enemy hates it so much. Well, he does hate the Lord’s appearing. When that happens, for him it is over.
He would come at us full-on, with stealth or deception, to try to take this away from the Lord’s people. I am not talking so much about the mechanics of the Lord’s coming. There are so many different thoughts on that among good brethren that I do not see how we could settle every detail.
I see how, when we thought the rapture was, or something like that—if we are loving His appearing, I think that is what matters. The Lord could have just made one or two extra verses in the Bible, spoken a couple more things, and had Paul write a couple more little verses down. Then it would all be clear.
It is so interesting how He sort of left it so that whatever you believe, you believe by faith. But His appearing—we want to love it, and we all shall.
Loving the Lord’s appearing is not something that happens when you get down on your knees, pray the sinner’s prayer, and come up. You do not immediately love the Lord’s appearing. You may hardly have even heard of it.
Perhaps you were a Christian before, and maybe you even mocked it because it sounded strange to you that these Christians actually believe that Someone, a religious figure from two thousand years ago, is going to come back to this planet and bring order in a government that reigns in righteousness.
Then someone spoke to you, along with the Holy Spirit. Now all you know is that you got up off your knees, perhaps, and now you are one. But as you begin to hear these things and begin to obey the Lord in this, this is what is so important.
The Word says—and He is talking to His disciples—“What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.” One day you are reading through your Bible, and you see that the Lord has called you not only to know that there is a coming, but to be alert concerning it and to know something about it.
Not only does the enemy want to rob us of looking for His appearing, but as His appearing comes, the prayers of the Lord’s people are more and more in play concerning that day.
I think that as the times go by, the Lord will have us pray for things that He reveals to us: “I want you to pray for this. My enemy is trying to accomplish this; pray against it. My enemy is trying to precipitate this; pray that it would not happen.”
The enemy would like to have as few prayer warriors, as few intercessors, and as few prayers concerning the Lord’s coming as he could have. So there is warfare against it and against us having that right mindset.
Things come into vogue in Christianity. I mentioned the other night how things come into vogue and can stay in vogue for centuries. If men are not careful in searching the Scriptures, they can be carried along in the current thing for such a long time.
Your granddaddy was carried along by it, and his granddaddy was carried along by it, and on and on and on, so that for someone to come and tell you anything different becomes almost like somebody is joking with you. I will give you an example: Israel.
Let me read you two Scriptures concerning Israel, especially concerning the times and epochs. Look first at Luke 21:23.
For there shall be great distress upon the land, and wrath unto this people:
and they shall fall by the edge of the sword,
and shall be led captive into all the nations:
and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles,
until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.
In other words, Israel was going to be sent to the ends of the earth, taken captive, and fall by the sword. This had a prescribed time to it that the Lord had ordained. There was going to be a certain time when the times for the Gentiles to trample Jerusalem underfoot would be over, and it would come back to the people of Israel.
Someone could have been aware of this Scripture and let it be a restraint, stopping them from going too far into things that the enemy would allow to come into the ecclesia to cloud the waters.
The other one I wanted to read to you is in Acts 1. After the disciples finally started acting right after the Lord was risen from the dead—you know, they just would not believe anybody. They knew a lot of people who would come and tell them, “He is risen, He is risen.”
They would not believe Mary Magdalene. “Nope, she is obviously out of her mind.” They would not believe Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Joanna, and some other women who came later on to the tomb to bring spices to anoint the body properly. They did not believe the brothers from Emmaus. They just were not believing.
The Lord had told them beforehand. He had even commanded them, “When I raise from the dead, you be waiting for Me in Galilee, on such-and-such a mountain.” But they were not there. They were still in Jerusalem.
Finally, when the Lord came to them that time, He did not appear to them again until the next week, because He was in Galilee where He told them to go. You know, they had to catch up on the obeying part.
Acts 1:3 says:
To whom He also showed Himself alive after His passion by many proofs,
appearing unto them by the space of forty days,
and speaking the things concerning the kingdom of God.
We not only have how long He spoke to them, but what He was speaking to them about: the things concerning the kingdom of God.
Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised:
For John indeed baptized with water;
but ye shall be baptized in the Holy Spirit not many days hence.
When they had come together, they asked Him, “Lord, dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” The Lord did not say, “Don’t you know I am finished with Israel, and now from now on there is no Israel, only the church? How long do I have to bear with you people?” He did not say that at all.
He had been speaking to them for forty days about the kingdom of God. What He said was:
It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father hath set within His own authority.
I think they had talked about it, but they did not know when. They thought they would ask Him, and He said, “It is not for you to know that. You just do what I said. Go and wait, receive the Holy Spirit, and begin doing what I taught you to do these three and a half years: build up this precious body of Mine and raise up ecclesia.”
After 70 AD, especially going into the second century, third century, and really the fifth century, Bible expositors began teaching something called replacement theology.
What it was based on was this: Israel is no more—not the nation, not the people. They have been cast out, and they are not coming back. Everything in the Old Testament or New Testament that speaks about Israel is now speaking of the church.
If it says Israel, think of the church. If it says the New Jerusalem, think of the kingdom of heaven, or whatever it is. But there is no possibility of these Scriptures being fulfilled just the way they are written. Although they seem to be written about Israel, they are not; they are written about the church. That was just fine.
Someone once was giving tenth-century people a hard time for thinking the earth was flat. “You know, all those idiots, those tenth-century people were so stupid.” Then the fellow said, “Of course, I wonder how the world would look if it really had been flat.”
Because it looks flat. If we did not have all the things we have gotten from standing on other people’s shoulders, and we just fell off a pumpkin truck yesterday, we would say, “Wow, we are on a flat place here. I wonder what happens when you get to the edge of it. Just do not move around too much. I think it will be all right.”
Yeah, it must be sitting on four elephants and on a big tortoise. After that, well, nobody has been after that, so we do not know.
Replacement theology was going along great in the fifth century, the tenth century, the fifteenth century, and even the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1700s and 1800s, some people began to see maybe some problems.
They saw what I just mentioned: the Lord said it is not for you to know about the times and epochs that the Father has fixed by His own authority. The Lord Jesus said Jerusalem was going to be trampled under the feet of the Gentiles until a certain time, and that this people would be out there in captivity.
But when Jerusalem came back to them, they had to come back to Jerusalem. Those are two things that had to happen. Some brave, good Bible teachers back in the 1800s especially began to go out on a limb and say, “You know, I think that actually these things in the Bible that are spoken about Israel are about Israel.”
When 1948 came around, and Israel fought for independence and got some of the land of Israel back, you should really have known—if it was not replacement theology—that the things in the Bible that spoke about Israel were about Israel.
The problem is, if you have been preaching something all your life, and your daddy and his daddy did too, you do not change that easily. You start talking about all sorts of things: “Well, how do we know that is really Israel? How do we know this is not just a one-time thing? This will have to have some longevity before anyone would really believe it.”
Then there were these wars that Israel kept winning, and the war of 1967, when they took Jerusalem. They had sovereignty—and still do today—over East and West Jerusalem.
Especially back in the 1960s, America was a “Jesus Is Coming” bumper-sticker kind of place. You thought, “Wow, the church, the ecclesia, is waking up to this fact that the Lord is coming and that maybe He is not finished with Israel. Maybe there is a salvation for Israel.”
The fact is that Israel was cast out to the ends of the earth because God wanted more than simply an inheritance from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He wanted a huge inheritance from the Gentiles.
If Israel had all believed when the Lord came, I believe the Lord had made so many promises that the kingdom would have needed to come then. But think about this: no one can come to the Lord and be saved unless the Lord draws him.
The Lord lavished His good pleasure for two thousand years on the people of Israel in the land of Israel. He called Abraham, one man out of all the men on the earth, and brought him into the land. He made the people grow numerous in Egypt, brought them back to the land, and gave them the Law.
He gave them all the books of Moses, the years that came afterward, the judges, the conquering of the land where the Lord threw out mighty peoples, and finally He brought them into a kingdom. Then there were the prophets—the Law, and then the prophets. So much has been given to us because the Lord kept giving to them.
What other nation was the Lord speaking to during the kingdom period of Judah and Israel? Was He saying things to a people in South America? Was He taking a people for Himself in North America, or people from China? There is a huge world out there. He exclusively was working through this man’s family—this man’s descendants who had become a kingdom.
After exclusively working with them, the Messiah came and kept a remnant for Himself. The rest were cast out in 70 AD. It looked like the Lord was through with them.
That is what I said: I wonder what it would have looked like to anybody on the earth, whether God was through with Israel or not. All those years had gone by. It sure seemed He was, until they realized, “Oh, the Lord is regathering His people into the land.”
Then they went back and started reading the prophecies and realized that the Lord really was doing something with Israel. He was not through with them. At a certain point, He was going to take away the hardness and blindness from among His own people.
I see an interesting parallel between Israel and Paul. Paul is the only person of whom it says this in Galatians:
But when it was the good pleasure of God,
who separated me, even from my mother’s womb,
and called me through His grace.
Good grief, Paul, when he was growing up as a little Pharisee, had already been called. When he began persecuting the church, he was already called.
When he started doing the things that he did, if I had lived back in that time, I might have gotten a couple of buddies together and done away with Paul before the Lord appeared to him. We would have been angry and said, “Let’s do it and repent afterward,” because he was so hard on the Lord’s precious people.
But had we done so, we would have been standing right in the face of God’s purpose. So the Lord did not let it happen. Paul went to Damascus. Before he got there, he saw a tremendous vision, fell down on his face, heard the Lord, and became the man who has given us so much of this Book.
He became a man who loved the Lord so much and whom the Lord used, maybe more than any other person in all of church history.
We did not know it then, but when we look back in the Bible, we know it. We know that God called him. Usually, we think of God taking a big room of people like this and saying, “Okay, let’s watch them for a while and see who the sharpest tools in the drawer are. We will run some relay races and see who the few good men are.”
Then He would pull out everybody else. But the Lord does not do that. The Lord chooses to use you for salvation, for what you are going to do in the body of Christ, for the gifts you will have, and all that kind of stuff before you are born. It is not a contest; it is to whom it has been given.
Israel is back in the land, and I see among Christians all sorts of antagonism toward them. You think, “What are you doing?” But they do not know.
The 1960s were full of “Jesus Is Coming.” Things have really turned around even today. Huge church movements have turned away from that and say, “No, what is happening is the Lord is going to spend as long as it takes to take the world for Christ. That is what has been given to us to do.”
“It may be six hundred years, seven hundred years, however many, and we may as well get on about winning the world for Christ. He is not coming. It is about His dominion spreading all over the earth.” In other words, Jesus is not coming.
Many denominations still hold to the fact of the Lord’s coming, but so many people are just bailing on that. How clever the devil has been. Instead of coming hard-faced against the fact that the Lord is coming, he has brought different things around which people can organize an association or a movement.
People say, “Oh, this is what the Lord is doing today.” But He is not coming.
It is important that there be some on the earth who are like Paul, who have loved the Lord’s appearing and have been obedient to the Lord.
“What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.” The Son of Man is coming at a time when you do not think that He is. “Oh, are You trying to fool me here?” The only way you can get past that is to be continually loving His appearing, watching, being on the alert, looking, waiting, and praying.
Just as a good soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ, good soldiers take up a command and do it because it is their duty. They are obeying their Commander in Chief, the Lord Jesus.
But while they are obeying Him, the Holy Spirit is working in them. They really do become people who love His appearing. They would do it whether they had been commanded to or not.
I remember when I was young. You know what I wanted when I was young? I was saved. I knew there were Christian things about to happen on the earth—the kingdom of God, the whole world—and I wanted to have a part of that.
I wanted to get credentials. That means learn what I needed to learn, suffer what I needed to suffer, bear the cross where I needed to bear the cross, until I had papers, if you know what I mean. In other words, I had a pedigree.
Then I would be sent by the Lord and by His people to some place and be part of this great bringing in of the Lord’s kingdom. I loved the Lord because He died for me. But if there had been a love-o-meter to measure it, I think it was anemic.
Certain things happen when young men or older men decide that they are going to be disciples of Jesus, following wherever He goes and getting in on this worldwide kingdom that the Lord is bringing in. The Holy Spirit begins to change you.
The Lord says, “Very well, come right this way. Here is your barracks. That is where you will sleep. You are in the school of Christ now.”
As you go and begin to learn His lessons—not suffering all that romantic stuff that you had in your mind, but really suffering—and as you come to know the Lord more and more as He draws you and reveals Himself to you, you become a different person.
I think for all those who have been obeying the Lord about being someone who is waiting for Him and praying for the Lord’s coming, the Holy Spirit is working, changing you into a person who loves His appearing and would do all that whether you had been commanded to or not.
The bondservant serves his master not because he has to, but because he loves him. He could have walked long ago, but he came to the place where he said, “No, I do not want to leave. I will never leave, and I will serve you because I love you.”
So much happens that way. It is really as though we are all hirelings. We used to say that name, “hireling,” as though it were something terrible: “You are just a hireling.” Well, the bondservant was just a hireling until he found out something about himself: that he loved his master and did not want to go away.
No one is born grown up. No one is born a bondservant. The Lord works deeply and continually, even while you are serving your time. At first, you are just doing what Christians are supposed to do. Then after a while, you find, “No, no, it is no longer for that. It is because it is You.”
The Lord has people who begin to, like Paul, love His appearing. They begin to find this prayer in them all the time: “Come. O Lord, come. Lord, we need You.”
It is no longer about being alert because I was told to. “Lord, I am alert because I cannot wait to see You. Lord, I cannot wait until that day when there is a declaration: ‘Behold, the Bridegroom cometh.’”
Who? The Bridegroom. It is the Spirit and the bride who say, “Come.” After a period of time, you find that you have the very thing in your heart that is in the bride’s heart.
You do not know how it got there. It got there because the Lord was working in your life by His Spirit, having His way.
Praise the Lord that He calls us. Those disciples, every one of them, when He called them, were all ready to go because this was the kingdom of God: “Jesus, we want to sit, one on Your right hand and one on Your left.”
James and John turned out to be some of the finest men the world has ever known, but they were not born that way. The Lord did not go out and see, “Now, who is going to do this?”
These were the kind of men who wanted a whole Samaritan village destroyed by incineration because they felt they had been slighted. “Lord, do You want us to call fire down from heaven on those people?”
You think, “Hey, I do not think this is the John that wrote 1 John, or especially not the Gospel.” Oh, how the Lord worked in that one.
They all wanted something. They wanted a place in the kingdom. That is what I wanted. I wanted to be in a better place, because a better place is better than a worse place.
But after you have been following the Lord, suddenly you find out He has been changing you. It is not sudden; it has been happening for a long, long time, and you are surprised by it. Usually, you find out by something that happens or by something somebody says to you, and you think, “You have got the wrong guy.” You are just not that aware of what the Lord is doing.
The devil wants to bring great warfare against us, a little company, a little insignificant, no-name, unimportant group of people. He would love to bring that warfare against the whole body of Christ, to get rid of this whole idea of having anything to do with the coming of the Lord.
But what did Peter say in 2 Peter 3:12?
Looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God.
Hastening? How could we be hastening times and epochs that the Father has fixed by His own authority? Amen. He has fixed them, and He has left some way in this whole thing for the people who love His appearing to be part of the hastening of that day. I do not understand all that. I just know that it is true.
I want to have that heart that says the same thing in it that the bride says. I believe that if you are not saying, in reality and truth, “Come, Lord Jesus,” you have no place or part in the bride.
I have known so many people. This people say this, those people say that; some people say there is no millennium, there are over a thousand years before the Lord comes, and every variation of all this.
But if you have the bride’s heart in you, there will be this: what the Book of Revelation tells us the bride says—the same thing that the Spirit says: “Come. Come, Lord Jesus.”
May we take this stand, especially while the Lord is right at the door. We have wasted enough time. Take this mind to be obedient to the Lord Jesus when He says, “What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch; for the Son of Man is coming at a time when you do not think.”
Lance said in those Richmond tapes I listened to, when he was dealing with this, he finally had to deal with his own heart. He said, “Lord, could it possibly be that You would come at a time that I do not expect You?”
I mean, here is a guy whose half ministry is about such things. I asked myself the same thing. It is not a bad thing to be before the Lord, pondering these things: “Lord, all I want to ask You is, help me to continually be on the alert.”
I do not think that will happen, but if, just at closing time, just at midnight—as midnight is dawning—I have become too tired, I feel they have won. Not just in myself, but in other people.
The enemy comes trying to wear you down, trying to wear you down more and more. Life hits you upside the head with something: “Oh no, another disaster.” You just think, “Oh, I just cannot do it.”
There are so many things the Lord has called us to that we almost say, “Please consider me excused,” like that man: “I bought a yoke of oxen; I need to go test them out. I bought a new farm.” Please consider me excused.
These are the days, brothers and sisters, when we should not consider ourselves excused. By the grace of the Lord, take hold—lay hold of grace and the anointing—and He will let you be doing what you are supposed to be doing in these last days, even if you are worn out.
Or maybe He is just pushing against that continual pushing of the evil one that makes you feel worn out. Hold on.
I would hesitate almost to use something that just came into my mind, because I do not know one way or the other whether the man was a Christian. But the most famous poet in the first part of the nineteenth century wrote:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve their turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
The Lord is at the door. The Lord is at the door.
There is no reason that we cannot be a people who all love the Lord’s appearing, just like our brother Paul.
Well, I think that is what I have to say. Maybe we could have some prayers, if there are any.