Oh, we are so delighted to be here in Your presence. There is no one like You, Lord Jesus.
And, Lord, we want our lives to be completely given over to You, continually knowing You and loving You.
Lord, we ask for anointing for our ears, for speaking. Lord, we ask that You would help my weakness, that I would have breath to speak, words to speak, strength.
Give me an open heaven, Lord, this morning. Lord, I will be saying things that are precious and that I hardly know. Help me.
And we will give You all the glory. In Your precious name we ask, amen.
Well, this last message is warfare and the love of the Lord’s person.
Now, it sounds a little silly to talk to Christians about the love of the Lord’s person. I mean, here is the One who has declared, “A body You have given,” and who walked on the earth with that body in complete righteousness to qualify to die for us.
And then He died for us, cleansed us of our sins, removed our sins as far as the east is from the west, and removed that sin nature. He has loved us to the uttermost. Not in my words, but I agree.
So why would it be such an urgent thing to speak to the Lord’s people about warfare and the love of the Lord’s person?
Well, I know that the devil, first of all, hates our Lord’s person. The devil is a murderer, a liar, and a thief. And he would do anything that he could to get something working among the Lord’s people that would stop us from coming to the place that the Lord Jesus has already appointed us to.
I have had a prayer for quite a while. I realize now—I have probably realized it before—but I realize now that part of the prayer was probably overstepping.
Because I have been asking the Lord for years, “Lord, give me a heart that loves You in such a way that very few of Your people have ever known.” That is the part that is overreaching.
Because when I begin to think back over the centuries, and our dear ones who lived throughout the first century, and all those who have given their lives in love for the Lord—and even today, because they say more people have been martyred this century than the others—I am thinking, “Well, the Lord has heard that part of it before.”
But I will just say, “Lord, give me a heart that loves You as much as You foreordained me to have.”
You know, the Lord has intended all of His people not to be enamored with Him, or to have that kind of love that Peter had, like a mere man would have.
You know, Peter was so sure that he loved the Lord with all of his heart. And when Jesus said, “Oh, you know, you are going to deny this night that you even know Me,” he almost was angry about it.
“I will never leave You. I will never forsake You. I am ready to go this night to prison and to death.”
Oh, how he loved the Lord Jesus as men love.
But we are not mere men, are we? We are the Lord’s new creation. So the Lord has not called us to love Him a little more. He has brought us into His school that we might love Him with a love that is like His love for us.
And the Holy Spirit, I think, will do this. He is working in us. We are in the school of Christ. He is trying to change all sorts of things about me, and I say, “Amen, Lord.”
But first and foremost, Lord, give me this heart that loves You, that has no hint of selfishness, that I might be—and that all of us might be—coming into that place of love for the Lord’s person that would not make us ashamed to be in the company of the Father and the Son.
So the enemy is going, in my life and in your life, to try to stop that. He has all sorts of methods.
He will try to fool you into thinking that you have made pretty good progress. He will bring something between you and another Christian. Maybe they never even did anything to you, but you have just got something about them that you do not like. And sometimes you do not mind saying something.
You know, I can always figure out something not to like about somebody who can please the flesh.
But, oh, the enemy could come by putting something between you and another brother or sister, between a husband and wife, between all sorts of things. And the Lord says, “You will know whether you are loving Me if you are loving Me.”
But still, I think, I am not going to dilute my prayer and talk about, “Oh, Lord, I want to love You and Your people.” That is another prayer, and I want to love those people.
But I want my love for the Lord Jesus to be without balance. And I can tell that He is working in me. He is so faithful to do this.
So that when we stand before Him in that day, He is already embracing us. “Oh, thank You. You gave me everything. You did not just allow me into Your life, but You allowed me to be Your life.”
And You put aside every hindrance so that that could be the situation.
So, I was thinking about some things that the Lord had taught me, a few things He had shown me, and especially this matter of where our eyes are and where our ears are.
We have had some ministry lately about the bondslave. And we know that the bondslave is very clearly given to his master and to his master’s house.
And our eyes are saying, “Lord, where would You have me look? Lord, I want to be able to look and to see You in some wonderful way before You have almost said it, as a servant looks for the hand of his master.”
Somehow, desiring to please my Lord.
I thought of those three mighty men. This is sort of an allegory—do not mind that—about those three mighty men, David’s top three men.
And in this allegory, David is like the Lord Jesus. He is in the cave, and he has the mighty men with him. And these guys—even the least of the mighty men—you would not want anything to get them mad at you. I mean, these guys were capable men.
But these three, it seems—I have a suspicion—they all knew the story of what happened. David uttered these plaintive words: “Oh, that someone would go to the well at the gate of Bethlehem, the well of my father, and draw me a drink from there.”
And those guys, he no longer said that, but they were on their way.
And you know what you think? Because David did not tell them to go. Did anybody else know about this? I think David said it loud enough that probably anybody could have heard, if their eyes and ears had been fixed on their king, the king that they loved so much.
And I tell you, I surely believe that any of the other mighty men could have gotten the job done. I think if Benaiah went, and Abishai, and any of the other ones, they would have come back with the same water.
Oh, but David, I think the most valuable thing he ever owned was that container of water that they drew for him—so much so that he poured it out as a thank offering to the Lord. He could not drink it. It was obtained with their lives.
Had their eyes and ears fixed on their Lord. Maybe the other guys were, you know, bumbling around and just coming back into the cave, wherever it was. But I know these three—Shammah, Eleazar, and Jashobeam.
I made these three guys characters in one of my books. I took their names because they were these real good guys, and I wanted to give them the best names I could. But now, even though you do all that, you forget their names.
And how these brothers—you know, here is another thing. Because there are just two little places in the Bible that sort of tell about this event. One is 2 Samuel 23, and the other is 1 Chronicles 11.
It is sort of like how sometimes Chronicles and Kings give the same report about something. But it is interesting: if you want to read all the exploits that Shammah, Jashobeam, and Eleazar did—if you want to read the exploits of the three mightiest men, that none of the others could come into their company—you know where you have to go in the Scriptures?
You cannot go anywhere, because they are not written on.
Then Benaiah is all through there. Abishai is all through there. These are famous men. But I have a feeling that these three were so set with their beings on the King whom they loved, they just were not interested in people knowing about what they had done for the Lord over the years.
You know, they were just the three mighty men for that one day.
You know, that tells me something. Is it not wonderful when you meet someone and there is an anonymity about them, and you really feel you have met someone of some great worth, and yet it was not all about them?
So it is sort of hard to break through that sort of, you know, that outer presence to find anything about them, because they are so fixed on the Lord Jesus, fixed on loving Him from the heart, from the spirit.
I think we will see many, many dear saints who gave their lives in love to the Lord, to serve Him in some out-of-the-way place that no one ever heard about, and no one ever wrote a story about them, or a song about them, or anything else.
They just wasted their life on the Lord Jesus and on whomever He gave them to be helpful.
I thought of Mary of Bethany, who was—well, I think she got the benefit of listening to the Lord say a lot of things.
It was not just that night that she was at the Lord’s feet. The Lord used to come there all the time. He loved to stay at their house. And you know, the Lord spoke from time to time about His eventual death. His disciples were deaf to it.
But it is so amazing that she had had her eyes and her ears fixed on the Lord Jesus, that that last night He was there, she went and got that alabaster box and broke it.
And she did not do that in some sort of ignorance—oh, what a lucky stroke. The Lord said it about her in two different Gospels: “She did this to anoint My body for burial.”
How many people had heard the Lord speak that, but did not hear it? They seemed something, but did not see anything. And I am talking about the Lord’s disciples. I am talking about people who really felt that they loved Him.
Or Mary Magdalene. When she was first there at the tomb that morning, all she knew was that she loved the person of her Savior.
And that He had been taken away from her, crucified, and buried. She just wanted to come and do right by His body.
And the Lord appeared to her first. Of all the people who could have come to the tomb early, of all the people who had an abandoned love for the Lord Jesus.
I was thinking about the ancients. You know, there are two people in the Bible that the Bible says walked with God. A lot of people, I think, walked with God, but the Bible does not say that they walked with God. Just two men.
In the same way that the Bible gives, almost exclusively, to Abraham the title of being the friend of God. Now Moses spoke to the Lord face to face as a man speaks to his friend, but the title, friend of God, goes to Abraham.
And one of these men is Enoch. This man had his son when he was sixty-five years old, and then he walked with the Lord all those three hundred years after that.
And even in the times when people were living nine hundred years, so intimate was this man’s relationship with the Creator that finally the Lord took him to be in heaven with Him.
I want that kind of love. I want that kind of following the Lord.
And the Lord wants to bring—I know this. I do not know what is all over the world, every place else—but I know that the Lord wants to bring everyone in this room into such a relationship with Him.
And I know that in my own life, the person who could do the most damage to that relationship would be me.
But the Lord is able to do it by the work of His cross, by revealing His heart to me, by teaching. He is able to answer my prayer.
I would suggest asking that from the Lord: “Lord, I want to have a heart that loves You as much as You have created me to have.”
Because so often we are hot, we are cold, lukewarm. And that first love—not anything of man’s ways about it, or the old creation about it—but we are being changed from glory to glory. We are His new creation, and that kingdom of His is a kingdom of love.
And there are some who will not come to that degree of passion for the Lord’s own person. But we can. If there is anything lacking in the body of Christ, we can supply more of it. Lord, let me.
I was debating whether to give this testimony, and I think I will.
Some of these things happened to me over thirty years ago. And a lot of people I know pretty well, maybe some of them have never heard of them before, because they were not common to me.
But about a year and a half after I had been born again, I was in Norfolk, Virginia. And I was lying in the back of the car we were driving in with another brother.
He went inside a 7-Eleven kind of place to buy a few things and pay for the gas. So we had sort of made a place where somebody could stretch out in the back.
He got out of the car and began to walk to the 7-Eleven, and all of a sudden the power, fullness, and glory of the Lord seemed to come upon me.
And I did not know where I was. I thought, “Am I someplace else?” I did not want to open my eyes to look. Love and glory were just going in me, down my body.
Then the brother came out of the store, and he got just about to the car, and there I was as I was. I do not know what kind of look I had on my face, and he said, “Okay, yeah, no, no, no, okay. All right.”
And we went back to Memphis.
Then later on, about six, seven, or eight months later, I was in California. People out there rented this place. It was a three-bedroom apartment, but, you know, the mattress on the floor was the bed. I mean, it was nice, but it did not have too many accoutrements.
And so I was sort of tucked away, and my wife said, “Oh, I will get up and go. I need to go to the bathroom, wash my face, and do some stuff.”
As soon as she walked in that room, the same thing happened. And I could not move, I could not talk, I could not do anything.
And then suddenly she opened the door. Yeah, I was as I was.
And later I said to the Lord, “Lord, You have allowed me to experience these things unsought for twice now. Lord, I am going to seek Your face.”
And so we were there in California. We used to meet a lot for prayer in the morning and that kind of thing. We had different places that would work for prayer. I remember a fraternity house that we fixed all up.
Someplace back around there was one of my hideaways—the Greek fraternity. Oh, wow, because you could go in there, and you could be in there for four hours, you know. We had rented this big fraternity, and no one was even staying in it.
And I cannot remember the other place, but I had some other sort of secret places that I would go to. And I would begin to seek the Lord’s face.
Sometimes it would be an hour, two hours, or something, and then the Lord would come. And after it was done, oh, on and on—usually He would just lift me into a gentle sleep. There I was.
And so I was having—I was not telling anybody about this—but I was having these experiences with Him, and something began happening to me in my heart.
I began to realize that I was seeking the Lord for this experience. You know, it was so—I just wanted to be there with Him in that state. But I was seeking it for myself.
And then finally—and it is not like I had it every day—you know, sometimes you would be seeking the Lord for four hours, but there was no rest, no peace. You would get up and say, “Well, I knew this every day. I got what I needed from the Lord.”
But from time to time, the Lord would meet me in that way.
I began to pray and speak to the Lord. I said, “Lord, I am not comfortable because I see partly why I seek You, why I seek this: so that I will have this.”
You know, I said, “Lord, I do not want to seek You for the blessing.”
So, Lord, I am going to seek Your face because I love You.
Back in those days, I was already probably praying, “Make me a person who loves You more than most.”
And since those years, every now and then it would happen. But sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night at home in bed, and I was in the middle of glory.
But I was not exactly seeking anything. The Lord was coming. Maybe He was coming all the time: “Okay, now come on. Come on. I have so much more that I want to give you. I have so much more intimacy.”
Maybe you need to make some more room inside you for more of Me.
And I think today that the Lord wants to make more room in me for more of Him.
And I know that the enemy, because again, he would come and encourage me in all sorts of things that would make me say, “Oh, the best is good enough. That is enough.”
But none of us have seen the limits of the love of Jesus for Himself that He wants to bring us into.
But I want to know those depths, those heights, and the love of God, which is beyond everything.
I would like to ask you young people—well, because I think young people almost every place are treated really the way I was referring to in a song a little while ago.
They are sort of brought into this thing: “I am so glad You are in my life,” rather than, “I am so glad that You are my life; that I have no other life, that I have no other pursuits, that I want to have no other one whose voice I am listening for.”
A whole new vista of following Him, knowing Him.
There is no reason why ten-year-old children cannot be loving the Lord. Not just, “Well, you know, they have their own little love for the Lord.” No, I am not talking about that. I am not talking about a Christian man’s or woman’s love for the Lord.
And I think the Lord, in these last days, would give us this desire for ourselves, for Him, for one another.
When I come to that time of being in the Lord’s presence bodily, I do not want to meet a stranger, or someone who is half a stranger.
I do not want to meet someone from whom I will possibly shrink back because I hardly gave Him myself when He purchased me.
We need to be seeking the Lord about this, lest we be going through motions, loving the Lord with that good old emotional love.
You know, when you sing certain songs, they just sort of move you like this. And I love emotional love. Emotions are part of love.
But I want the Lord’s work to be done in me to such an extent that, though I have not seen Him, I love Him with all my heart.
Who knows? Maybe the Lord will see His face before He comes. I think there are great, many amazing things that are on the cusp for the Lord’s people, if we will only let Him.
It is more important than any other thing that we have talked about. I want to love the Lord’s people with all my heart, but out of the love that I have with Jesus.
I want to know the Lord’s purpose. I want to be alive to His coming. But His person—not His things, not the things He can do for me. Oh, how the Lord has done so many things for me. But Him.
One or two, three, four, five, six, seven people could start a whole explosion in an assembly.
Thank You for joining us to Yourself through salvation.
And Lord, we want to say to You that it is not enough to us just to be living a clean life and on our way to heaven.
But to be going with You wherever You go, wherever the Lamb goes—for us to be going that same way, holding nothing back, loving You.
Lord, put these prayers in us. Keep them in us, for we have an enemy. He would defeat us.
Well, we know this is the greatest thing that is on Your heart: that Your people would love You to the uttermost—for You, not for the thing of how much we can serve You.
Lord, I love to serve You. How much we can do for You, how much we can proclaim Your kingdom, Lord, how much we could do—what You are looking for is people who love You just as You have loved us.
Help us, Lord. Help us. Help us keep our eyes upon You. Lord, help us keep our ears upon You.
Lord, keep us from wandering away, from being distracted, or being enticed by the things of this world.
Oh, Lord, if You will do this for us, we will give You all the glory.
And what can we say, Lord, but grace, grace, grace? You did it all, Lord. You drew us to Yourself, gave us Your Spirit, and kept working in us.
Thank You.