We shared this song, I think, on the first night—or perhaps the second night. There is a poem, as long as I have seen it, in many different forms, and I believe it is attributed to A. B. Simpson, although he may have picked it up from somewhere else and finished it somewhat.
Anyway, the basic idea is that God has His best things for the few. We sang this on the second night, and let us try to sing it again before we study the Word of God. Some of you, of course, were not here, but I think you will be able to pick it up. We will sing it a few times.
God has His best things for the few
Who dare to stand the test;
He has His second choice for those
Who will not take His best.
The good is the enemy of the best;
Without His best there is no rest.Some others make the highest choice,
But when by trials pressed,
They shrink, they yield, they lose the cross,
And so they lose His best.
The good is the enemy of the best;
Without His best there is no rest.
And Lord, as we come to You tonight, we thank You for so great a salvation that we have in Jesus Christ, even presented before us tonight as we sat around His table. Thank You for all that You have given us so freely by Your sacrifice.
Thank You that You have given us an anointing for tonight’s meeting: a refreshment for our bodies, an illumination for our minds, and a heart to obey. O Lord, we take all these things and more—all Your provisions, the best—in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, I think most of you know that we are sharing from—or chewing on—the meat of the Word from the letter to the Hebrews. We want to go there tonight and begin reading in Hebrews 3.
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling,
consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.
He was faithful to Him Who appointed Him,
as Moses also was in all His house.
For He has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses,
by just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house.
For every house is built by someone,
but the builder of all things is God.
Now Moses was faithful in all His house as a servant,
for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later;
but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house—
whose house we are,
if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.
Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today if you hear His voice,
do not harden your hearts as when they provoked Me,
as in the day of trial in the wilderness,
where your fathers tried Me by testing Me,
and saw My works for forty years.
Therefore I was angry with this generation, and said,
‘They always go astray in their heart,
and they did not know My ways’;
as I swore in My wrath,
‘They shall not enter My rest.’”
Take care, brethren,
that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart
that falls away from the living God.
But encourage one another day after day,
as long as it is still called “Today,”
so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.For we have become partakers of Christ,
if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end,
while it is said,
“Today if you hear His voice,
do not harden your hearts, as when they provoked Me.”
For who provoked Him when they had heard?
Indeed, did not all those who came out of Egypt led by Moses?
And with whom was He angry for forty years?
Was it not with those who sinned,
whose bodies fell in the wilderness?
And to whom did He swear that they should not enter His rest,
but to those who were disobedient?
So we see that they were not able to enter because of unbelief.
Therefore, let us fear lest, while a promise remains of entering His rest,
any one of you may seem to have come short of it.
For indeed, we have had good news preached to us, just as they also;
but the word they heard did not profit them,
because it was not united by faith in those who heard.For we who have believed enter that rest,
just as He has said,
“As I swore in My wrath,
‘They shall not enter My rest,’”
although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.
For He has said somewhere concerning the seventh day,
“And God rested on the seventh day from all His works”;
and again in this passage,
“They shall not enter My rest.”Therefore, since it remains for some to enter it,
and those who formerly had good news preached to them failed to enter because of disobedience,
He again fixes a certain day, “Today,”
saying through David after so long a time,
just as has been said before,
“Today if you hear His voice,
do not harden your hearts.”
For if Joshua had given them rest,
He would not have spoken of another day after that.
So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.
For the one who has entered His rest
has himself also rested from his works,
as God did from His.Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest,
so that no one will fall through following the same example of disobedience.
For the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword,
and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit,
of both joints and marrow,
and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
And there is no creature hidden from His sight,
but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do.
And then just a few verses in Hebrews 12, from verse 1.
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us,
let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us,
and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,
fixing our eyes on Jesus,
the Author and Perfecter of faith,
Who for the joy set before Him endured the cross,
despising the shame,
and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
For consider Him Who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself,
so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood
in your striving against sin;
and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons:“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor faint when you are reproved by Him;
for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines,
and He scourges every son whom He receives.”It is for discipline that you endure;
God deals with you as with sons.
For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?
And then finally, in Hebrews 13, verse 10.
We have an altar from which those who serve the tabernacle
have no right to eat.
For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy place
by the high priest as an offering for sin
are burned outside the camp.Therefore Jesus also,
that He might sanctify the people through His own blood,
suffered outside the gate.
So, let us go out to Him outside the camp,
bearing His reproach.
For here we do not have a lasting city,
but we are seeking the city which is to come.
We have read just a few of the strong exhortations that we find in the letter to the Hebrews. The exhortations are very strong. But the shaking that is to come will prove whether we have heard and heeded those exhortations.
In Hebrews 6:1, we are told to press on to maturity. This pressing on is a very deliberate act. Basically, in this great salvation presented to us in this letter, pressing on to maturity reduces itself down to one thing: our full confidence in Jesus Christ our Lord—not only as the all-sufficient sacrifice for our sins, but as the all-sufficient Savior Who can save us to the uttermost. And so we press on into maturity.
We mentioned last time that the way we begin to move toward maturity is really not by some self-initiative, but rather by a response to something we see that draws us forward.
Now, many of us start out in the Christian life. We know our Lord Jesus as our Savior, we know of His salvation, and we start to walk with Him. But somewhere along the way—during a message, during communion, during a prayer at home, or perhaps while reading a book—something opens. The heavens open.
We suddenly realize that we have grossly underestimated the greatness of our salvation, the greatness of our Savior, the greatness of the eternal purpose, and the greatness of our calling. Something opens to us. As the writer of Hebrews puts it, “But we see Jesus.”
After seeing the failure of man to be perfected according to the purpose God had for man, we see Jesus: the first Man in glory, the first One to make it through, the first Man, as man in flesh and blood, to live on this earth without sin.
Having passed the test of all the temptations common to mankind, He went to the cross and died for our sins according to God’s wonderful plan to bring many sons to glory. Now, having risen victorious, He sits at the right hand of the Father. What a wonderful picture of the Man in glory and of the worship that we bear.
This vision is necessary in our lives as a motivational way of getting us forward. We find, as we begin to pursue the Lord, that He meets us along the way in increasing amounts, as we are able to bear it.
This vision of glory is seen so wonderfully in the lives of people like the Apostle Paul, Isaiah, and others. We see these quintessential visions and openings of heaven, with the glory of Christ seen. But that is not the experience of most of us.
Yet it is not an experience that is the exclusive domain of a few mystics. The Holy Spirit’s primary work right now is to bring us into all the truth of Christ—to take the things of Christ and present them to us.
Or, as Paul would put it, there is a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Jesus Christ that is revealing Christ in His glory to us.
It is not just the Savior as He walked upon the earth—meek and mild, the Gospel Jesus whom we know—but now Jesus above. Jesus whom, when John saw Him—the beloved disciple—he fell down as one dead.
But when we see the Christ of glory, there is a change in our lives, an upgrade in our calling, and a different attitude toward the things of God and toward His purpose. This bringing many sons to glory sounds like some kind of pie-in-the-sky thing, until you see that this is really the Lord’s plan. He lays hold of your life and begins to work in that very direction.
I remember that I started off as a Christian, felt called to the ministry, went into seminary, and came out on the other side as a Baptist minister. I loved the Lord and preached the gospel, but especially in the matter of the church, I had no idea that the church was a glorious church.
I just thought the church was a good Baptist church. Now, that is the best church around, there is! The way we do things is all right. People come up, and they either give us a letter that they are from another Baptist church, or we dunk them in the water. We had a good thing going.
But it was a rough-and-tumble church. There was a lot of fighting going on, the deacons were working out some things, and every year we had to conscript Sunday school teachers. It was not a very spiritual deal; it was just that you had to do it. So you found a woman who could read and write, and she was the third-grade teacher. That was it.
Well, that was the way we looked at it. We loved the saints, but it was just kind of a rugged thing. Then, of course, to my surprise, one day, by the mercy of God, as I saw the Lord Jesus in a much higher way, I also saw His church.
And I saw that He was really—I do not know how else to put it—really serious about a glorious church.
Suddenly, my standards changed, and I was not satisfied with what I saw. So, being the pastor, I tried to change it twelve different ways. That only made it worse.
Then, of course, I saw that the primary problem with this configuration was me. And so began a whole kind of re-understanding of what it means to be called in the heavenly calling, and so on and so forth.
But you see what I am saying? You have to see it, or else you are quite satisfied with the way things are. If you have a good kind of ministry, you are serving God in some way, and you are all very happy about it—until you see the Lord’s desire.
It is not like the Lord’s standards; it is not His legalistic level of acceptability. It is what His heart wants. And when we see what His heart wants, then we have to decide what to do about that.
From that time on, I found it very hard—in fact, impossible—for me to stay in a denominational configuration, because it was not responding to the Lord Jesus’ heart.
Since that day, I have never seen a perfect congregation. But I have seen some people, and as scraggly as they may be, they really want to satisfy the Lord Jesus’ heart.
So much so that I believe if the Lord said, “Now I see this wrong,” as He said to Ephesus, or whatever, they would repent and ask the Lord to deal with it. Now, that is the best that we can hope for at this time.
The Lord has a process going on, but the point is this: unless you see the glorious church, you have no motivation to do anything other than what you already have.
That is all part of this Man in glory that we have been talking about. On the last occasion, we spoke about seeing the glorious High Priest. Of course, the High Priest ministered to us just now.
There is no time for me to say more about it, but let me just say a few simple things. It is this: the High Priest’s call to us, morning, noon, and night, by the Spirit of God—on our bed and when we first awake—is, “Draw nigh unto Me.”
When we go to bed, or when we wake in the morning, there is that still, small voice of our precious High Priest saying, “Draw nigh.” Hebrews uniquely reveals the very human side of Jesus: His struggling to learn obedience and the sufferings He went through as a human being.
The whole point is, you know what? Jesus says, “Come to Me.”
We say, “No, no, no, it is too simple.”
He says, “Come to Me.”
We say, “No, no, I already came to You, and then I left You.”
He says, “No, no, no. Come to Me.”
If you see the Man in glory, you see that the eyes of this High Priest are filled with tender mercy, and you come. Then He says, “Now draw near to the throne of grace. You need grace. You need mercy. Come with Me. I will show you where it is.”
He takes you into the throne of grace. You find yourself before a God Who is full of grace, and He offers it to you.
Then, having done that, He says, “There is one more place we should really go.”
You say, “What is that?”
He says, “Let us go to the holy of holies.”
You say, “No, no, no, no. I am not dressed properly.”
He says, “You know what? You are coming by My blood. Let Me take you by the hand and lead you in.”
There is a holy of holies before an unseen God, and you can worship Him.
Only such a glorified Man, such a Man of understanding and patience and love, can bring us in. But His voice we always hear: “Draw nigh. Draw nigh.”
Could I say this? A real mark of maturity is how often we draw near. It is that crucial to our lives.
Of course, everybody here has a workaday life. You have to go to work, you have to raise the kids, and you have to do whatever it is you have to do. That is fine. But have you drawn nigh?
It is a mark of maturity, you see, because after a while you learn that it has nothing to do with my worthiness or unworthiness. It has nothing to do with my preparedness or unpreparedness. The precious blood has opened the way, and I just, by grace, need to come and grab the hand of my High Priest as He takes me into the Father’s presence.
It is a very humbling thing to be a Christian for forty-three years and still say, “Jesus, would You take me into the Father, please?” But we shall be doing that today and forever.
Now the enemy contests this drawing nigh. One of the ways he tries to rob us is to keep you away from that throne of grace, so that you have a nice, ungracious day—to keep you from worshiping in the holy of holies and keep you outside, banging a tambourine in the outer court.
There are all kinds of things in your own mind, and all kinds of things that are dead set against you drawing nigh.
The law tells you who you are. Grace tells you Who He is. Now, who are you going to listen to?
Your conscience says, “Look inside of you, you dirty, rotten person.” You start to mess around with your conscience very long, and the next thing you know, there is a lot of lint in the belly button. There is no way that you can draw near.
But the Spirit says, “Look away to the blood of Jesus.” You have to make your choice.
We have to move ourselves beyond our introspection and our lousy feelings. It is not a question of being unworthy. Of course, we are unworthy. It is a question of what He has provided for us as the High Priest.
We have to leave it there because, as we are looking at this glorious Son of Man, now we want to consider Him as Jesus, the Apostle of our confession.
This Man in glory is also the Apostle of our salvation. We have seen the Apostle while He was on earth. We saw Him tread the way of the cross and open the way before us. As the Apostle, He treads the way and opens the way for us to come to salvation.
But now we need to see the Apostle in His glory in heaven. Now that you are saved and have seen the Apostle of the Gospels, He wants you to see the Apostle—the glorious Apostle Who would bring us to perfection.
If the watchword of the High Priest was, “Draw nigh unto Me,” the watchword of the Apostle is, “Look unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of your faith.”
No matter what, look unto Jesus. Look away unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of your faith.
The same grace that bids us come into the holiest also leads us outside the camp. We are to live in the holiest and outside the camp.
Most Christians live outside the holiest and inside the camp.
But according to Hebrews 13, as we just read, you do not find Jesus in the camp. He had to go outside the camp. The exhortation is, “Will you not meet Him out there?” He is outside the camp.
Now, the camp in Hebrews was first and foremost Judaism, which rejected Jesus and threw Him out. But it is strange how Christendom has a dislike of the Lord Jesus.
Surely, in these last days, as we are in the phase of the Laodicean age, our Lord Jesus is outside, knocking on a door where people are not listening because they are self-satisfied.
But this Apostle wants to bring us unto maturity. We are partakers of a heavenly calling, and we are always to be looking away to Jesus. The issue is the perfecting of our faith: looking unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith.
You were saved by grace, and that was His authorship by His finished work. But He wants your faith perfected, and He, as the Apostle, is well able to do it.
Enthroned and glorious, this Man as an Apostle will bring many sons to glory by His ministration.
We will only look at two things tonight. The first is this: He perfects our faith by leading us into His rest. The second is: He perfects our faith as we run the race unto sonship.
The first concerns the Scriptures we read in Hebrews 3 and 4. You are aware that this is a story from the Old Testament: Israel’s sojourn, coming out of Egypt, going through the wilderness, and going into the promised land. This is the illustration the author uses to show us where we need to get to.
Canaan land—the rest, the glory land—that is the picture before us here. Moses is the apostle. Indeed, he is an apostle; indeed, he is a faithful apostle. Indeed, he is an apostle who was arrested himself by a vision of glory.
Not only at the burning bush, but again up on the mountain, he had such fellowship with the Lord, compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy.
Moses said, “Show me Thy glory.”
The Lord said, “Well, I am sorry, I can only show you the back. If you saw the whole thing, you would be fritzed.”
But Moses saw something of His glory. Oh, he was caught. From then on, he was caught. It did not matter how troublesome the children were, because he saw the children—God’s children—and God’s plan too.
God was trying to gather them together, draw them to Himself, make His children His possession, and make them a kingdom of priests. Moses saw that purpose.
While he was on the mountain, in that momentary glory that he saw, you see, you not only see the Lord, as it were, but you also see His purpose, and you also see His house. Moses saw the house, and he had to build according to the pattern of what he saw. That is all part of that glorious purpose he saw on the mount.
Moses was faithful, no doubt about it. But Moses could not bring the children into Canaan’s rest. He could not do it. You can hardly say it was his fault.
The children, as God’s possession, had everything going for them. They had the presence of God—the fire by night and the cloud by day. They had the promise of God: “Go in and take the land flowing with milk and honey. This is your rest. This is your inheritance. Go get it. I am with you.”
They had the promise of the Word and the presence of God. They had daily provisions as they walked through the wilderness. They even had the order all worked out: who goes in first, what tribe goes ahead in war. They had all of that—the promises, the presence, the Word, and the apostle.
But they got to Kadesh-barnea, and they could not go in.
They did not accept the minority report of Joshua and Caleb, and they could not go in. They could not mix it with faith, as it says in Hebrews 4.
Indeed, they had good news preached to them,
just as we also;
but the word they heard did not profit them,
because it was not mixed with faith in those who heard.
And so the Lord said, “You shall not enter My rest.”
If you follow the story through Hebrews 4, you see that even when Joshua finally brought them into the promised land, he brought them into the land indeed, but he still did not bring them into rest.
How could they rest? They had no king, and everybody was doing what was right in his own eyes. So they were in Canaan, but they were not enjoying it. That is why David said centuries later that God is still waiting for us to enter His rest.
But now we have Jesus, the Apostle. He is not just a servant in the house of God; He owns the house of God—whose house we are. He is a better Apostle in every way. His design is to bring many sons to glory and bring Christians into Canaan’s rest.
Now, what is this Canaan’s rest? At least it is two things that we know.
Because this is talking about growth and maturity, the rest that He is talking about finally is the millennial rest, the kingdom rest—coming into our inheritance in the kingdom through abiding faithfulness in Christ.
The reward of faithfully walking with the Apostle is that you enjoy the inheritance in the kingdom when our Lord comes back. I do not know if you do not think that is going to happen, but I happen to, so that makes me happy.
There is going to be Jesus returning and setting up His kingdom, and there is a place in the inheritance for those who have been faithful.
But as many Scriptures are, this one also has not only that ultimate fulfillment but an immediate fulfillment: for the Christian, there is an entering into His rest even while on this earth. There is an enjoying of the land of Christ as your inheritance, even imperfectly, as you tread the hills and valleys of all that Christ is.
This is to be our portion too. As you know, I always feel like when I am here, I am preaching to the choir, because so many of you have tasted the milk and the honey. You know just a little something about the land of Canaan, the land of Christ in His goodness and fullness.
Some of you live in the good of it even now and rejoice that you have found your rest.
But so many Christians have no idea there is a Canaan land in this lifetime. They are saved and just holding on by the skin of their teeth until they die and can go to heaven, because they have no prospect of maturity in their lives except that they will keep praying, keep giving, and do a couple of things like that.
The warning is that it is possible to be the church, the house of God, and to be out of Egypt but not in the promised land—to be stuck in the middle somewhere, halfway out and halfway in.
This is a problem of our faith needing to be perfected. Is it not strange that, as the Lord is dealing with us to be perfected, this is the way He decides to perfect us?
He says, “Now here you go, Joe. I am going to perfect you. Here is the way I am going to do it: I am going to throw you in with a whole mob. It is My household. We have new ones and old ones, spiritual ones and carnal ones, zealous ones and lukewarm ones. Here is where I am putting you to be perfected.”
Can you imagine? I cannot imagine anything as impatient as being Caleb and Joshua with this sorry bunch. They could have gone in thirty-eight years before the rest of them. They were ready at Kadesh-barnea, two years out of Egypt, and they had to wait another thirty-eight years for all the rest of them to catch up.
That was exactly the situation that perfected Joshua and made him able to bring them in at the end. Thirty-eight wasted years—God’s preparation.
There is a lot of mystery in all of this, and I am not saying that the Scriptures are altogether clear about this mystery of bringing many sons to glory. But when we find these little clues, we can find help in this.
The children of God—the Christians today—can get stuck in that halfway place. They are out, but they are not in.
The question is, “What more do we need?” Ah, yes—more faith. Well, okay. How about more of the Word of God? That is what we need. More promises. We only have a thousand promises in my promise box. Get me another two hundred, and we can make it in!
Is that what we need? How about more presence? Ah, yes, the presence of God. That is something everybody is talking about now in the worship renaissance. How about more time? Or more obedience? Or just another leader?
That became the children of Israel’s complaint: “We have the wrong leader. That is why we are going nowhere.”
Can we do better than this Apostle we have? Even the Lord Jesus—He is our Apostle. Why can we not go in?
This is the lesson we have to learn in our maturing process. In fact, we cannot go in—and you know what the reason is, do you not?
Our Apostle wants to take us in, but we have misnamed the Apostle. We call Him Jesus, the Apostle and Perfecter of our faith. But in this case, we have to realize how He takes us into Canaan land, and it is this: It is Jesus Christ and Him crucified that brings us into the promise.
It is Christ crucified. Until we understand that, we cannot go in.
Flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God. What we have in this wilderness of church life is a lot of flesh: a lot of arguing, a lot of murmuring, a lot of ideas. Just like with the children of Israel, that has all got to die. It cannot get into the promised land.
But we all think, “At least I know that my ideas are the right ideas. I am going to fight you about it until I die.”
The Lord says, “Okay.”
Let us go back to Hebrews 12, because this is the motto, as it were, for following the Apostle. Do not just read verse 1 or the beginning of verse 2, as we tend to do, but the whole of verse 2.
Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,
fixing our eyes on Jesus,
the Author and Perfecter of faith,
Who for the joy set before Him endured the cross,
despising the shame,
and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
That is how the Apostle made it through into glory. Now, how are we going to make it through into glory? Ah—we have got to be crucified. Our flesh has got to die, or we are not going in.
This is a lesson of maturity that we learn.
We have this idea that the Lord would say to us, as the Apostle, “I would never send you anywhere that I have not already trod. But now that I have trod it, I whistle back to you. I have already opened the way. Come on, let us go.”
But somehow we cannot make it through.
That is our idea because we always have this idea of a separated God from us Who is calling us up hither, as it were. But He would never say, “I would never send you someplace where I have not gone.” He would never send you.
Why would He send you?
“I would never send you, but I will take you with Me into the promised land.”
Oh, now that is a whole other thing.
This is all part of learning how to live by the life of Christ. Something has got to be crucified, and something has got to live. Our flesh is not going to make it into this land of promise, into glory, into rest.
But He says, “No, no, I am not going to tell you to come in. But I will take you, if you let Me.”
We begin to learn that we can obey in His life, and He will bring us in.
This leads us to the second point in this matter of learning how to live by His life and not by our own. It is the same thing regarding the Word of God.
We think that we should hear the Word and say, “Okay, I am going to obey the Word. I heard a word; obey the word; I go.” Well, it is true in a simple way. That is what happens.
But if we are talking about going into glory, it is a little more complicated than that, because the word that tells you, “Go into glory,” is impossible for us.
Whenever He gives a word that is impossible, there is only one thing to do. You have to say, “Lord, I cannot do it, but You can do it. I believe in Your Word. I put my full trust in Your Word.”
I do not know if you have experienced this, but the reality is that the Word begins to take you into the reality of it.
We have this mentality today. It is a very popular thing in the move of God today to talk about heroes. What we need is heroes—anointed men and women standing up by faith, obeying a word of God, crashing through the barriers.
It is a very noble thing, and people get stirred up. Young people love the idea of having a hero because a lot of them think maybe they could be that.
But I will never forget the first time I heard a man named Major Ian Thomas. You probably know who he is. He was muttering in his English accent in such a way that it was hard to hear him unless you really listened, but after a while my ear tuned in.
He told the story about how he first came around to understand that he had to live—but not him; he had to live by the life of Christ in him.
He was already a servant of God, and it came down to this. The Lord said, “I want you to go down there and witness to the students at the University of London.”
He said, “No, Lord, I cannot go.”
The Lord said, “But I want you to go.”
He said, “Then I am going to go because You want me to go, but I do not know what I am supposed to say.”
The Lord said, “That is okay. I will tell you what to say.”
He started learning the exchanged life by a dialogue of recognizing his impossibility, then turning it over to the Lord and trusting His possibility. Do you understand that?
If we are going to grow, we need to grow past this idea that what we need is more faith and to be some kind of noble hero: “Whatever You say, Lord. Aye, aye, sir.” Then He tells you to do impossible things.
Oh, but wisdom realizes that what you say is, “Well, Lord, You are telling me something that only You can do, so I am going to hang on to Your life. If this is Your Word, then I believe it. I trust Your Word. Now You take me into it.”
When you look at the lives of the men—the champions of faith, the heroes of faith—in Hebrews 11, you find people who just submitted to what God told them.
God said to Abraham, “You are going to have a child.”
Well, after trying this way and that, Abraham said, “Okay, I guess it is time for me to believe God. I have gone this way and that way; that did not work.”
He did not immediately start some kind of honeymoon campaign to have a child now that God had told him. He said, “God, I trust Your Word,” and lived his life normally. By Your Word, You bring me into that, because His Word is living.
At the end of this whole story about entering into His rest, we find out that we cease from our own works and enter His rest. Then the story continues:
For the Word of God is living and active
and sharper than any two-edged sword.
If we let the living Word do its work in us, it will bring us to obedience.
I am not saying that you just hear the Word and then go away as a forgetful hearer. I am saying that you hold on to the Word and say, “Now, Lord, that is Your Word. I am holding on to it because only You can bring me into that.”
That is how we go through the Jordan. Hold on to the Word, not the world. Hold on to the Word. It will give you enough oxygen when you are under the water, and it will bring you through.
So we come into rest. Our Apostle, this glorious Man in glory, is the crucified Christ. Everything that you achieve in the way of abundance, rest, and the life of Canaan is achieved through death and resurrection.
By the grace of God, when we end up on the other side and are in Canaan land, experiencing some kind of whole new life, it is a whole new account of life. We have to discover how to live on resurrection ground. We are so used to living on the old, decayed ground on the other side.
That is why we can get into the promised land and yet not enjoy it. We do not know how to rest in it.
But what is this word of rest anyway? Hebrews 4:1 says that we enter into His rest. It is not our rest; it is His rest. But it becomes our rest if we are in His rest. He completed the work. If we rest in Him, His completed work makes us work the best.
Someone who has entered into that rest has ceased from his own works, as God did from His. When you cease from your own works, that is when your works are the most effective and the most frequent, because when it is His rest and His work, it is completely different.
Only the Lord can bring us into this wonderful life: possessing Christ, wanting to know Him, studying His Word, standing on His Word, trusting in His Word, and finding obedience to His Word by His life within us.
It is an amazing life. It is a glorious life. It is the best life—living in the better plains.
Let us finish by looking at Hebrews 12 again, because here is the second picture we have. Here we find our Apostle, the Man in glory, and yet our Apostle is running with us.
He is not two miles ahead saying, “Well, I have already had My run. Go ahead; you run now.” No. You know what? The Apostle is so patient, He runs two miles an hour if that is all you can do.
Run with patience, run with endurance, the race that is set before you. What is the race that is set before you? The race of bringing you on to glory. That is the race set before you in the book of Hebrews.
It is not the race of your ministry, the race of your marriage, or the race of your schooling. It is the race of God’s purpose in you to bring you to glory. You have got to run that race with patience. You have got to run it with endurance.
But you have got to run it with Jesus, the Apostle. He knows how to run you through this course.
From the moment we are Christians, we are now the sons of God, as it says in 1 John 3:2:
Beloved, now are we the sons of God,
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be:
but we know that, when He shall appear,
we shall be like Him.
It is true: we have been bought by the precious blood, and we are the children and sons of God. But this matter of becoming sons is a question of maturity. It is a matter that involves discipline—the discipline of the Holy Spirit.
This throws off many Christians when they begin to be disciplined by the Lord Whom they thought loved them. They faint and say, “The Lord does not love me anymore.”
But here is the deal. We have been saved, it is true, and we are living as a new self. This new self is being formed and created in the image of God. We have a new self, a new life, and a new being. But this new life needs to be disciplined.
We start out with our spirit so weak. He wants to strengthen our inner man. There is a discipline involved in the Word, prayer, understanding, exercise, obedience, and all this that strengthens the inner man.
As it says in Hebrews 12:12:
Strengthen the hands that are weak
and the knees that are feeble.
Those are not bad hands. Those are not evil hands. They are just the weak hands of somebody who needs the discipline and exercise of service. That is what the hands are all about.
And strengthen the knees that are feeble. We begin as Christians, children of God, but our walk is a little feeble, a little wobbly. What does the exhortation come from the Spirit of God? “Strengthen the knees.”
Not, “Okay, just walk on your knees. Oh, wait, hang on, I will get you a bicycle.” No, this is the discipline of the Spirit.
He begins to strengthen the things that are weak. It is a process of discipline. When we are running the race, we never get past the fact that we need to lay aside weights.
All right, we have done a lap and come around: “I have got to get rid of this sweatsuit.” Take another lap around: “These knee-high sneakers, I have got to trim them down.”
We are always going to have to get rid of weights—these weighting things in our lives that are part of the trimming process—not to mention the besetting sins that creep into our lives throughout our lives.
It is never that we stop dealing with sin and things. But I am talking about a positive discipline of the new man that you are. He still needs to be disciplined. Our minds are renewed, but they need to be illuminated.
There is a process here. The Spirit of God is faithful in His discipline, disciplining our lives unto maturity. That is how we become sons. The Spirit says, “Okay, strengthen those legs. Come on, walk the street. Walk.” The Spirit of God is sent by the Apostle.
How else are we going to share His holiness unless we are disciplined?
They disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them,
but He disciplines us for our good,
so that we may share His holiness.
All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful;
yet to those who have been trained by it,
afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
He is not disciplining us because He does not like us. He says, “You are My son. Of course I love you. That is why I am whipping you into shape.”
It is a Father Who is really possessive of His child growing to maturity Who disciplines us in these spiritual matters. He disciplines us in matters of character until it becomes proven character—with righteousness, holiness, and peace, without which no man will see the Lord.
Along with the discipline process, He also narrows the way of the racetrack. As a matter of fact, as He brings us to maturity, He narrows our ministry down to one: Him.
I do not know if you have ever thought about that. I used to minister to a lot of people, but I have this funny feeling that I am getting narrowed down.
The Lord is our Apostle, and we are to serve Him. He is the Head of the whole work. We are to minister to Him, and then He will break our vessel and pour us out where He wants us to go.
It is something when you are in Christian ministry and you are working for these people, that association, and these people who are contributing, and you do not know whom you serve.
Here is the deal: serve only Him, the Apostle. Serve the Apostle. Listen for His voice. Get your directions from Him.
If you are going not just to work works and serve the house of God, but to serve the purpose of God, you have got to be sent out by the one Apostle Who does God’s work.
All the rest of the stuff is a lot of business sometimes that bears temporary fruit. But when we are narrowed down to serving our one Lord—the One with Whom we have to do—then He sends us on a life poured out more than we ever knew when we were ministering to people and the house.
The Lord loves people. But in your maturation into sonship, there has got to be an exclusive relationship between you and the Lord.
This also leads to the third part of this: He takes you outside the camp. Now, He does not take you outside the camp. When you read it, actually what it says is that you go out to Him, and He is outside the camp.
So it is not a question of saying to somebody, “Well, you need to leave that church. It is the camp.”
You do not have to bother with any of that. You just say, “Follow the Lamb wherever He goes.” Just follow the Lamb wherever He goes, and if you do that, you will find yourself outside the camp.
It is not even worth trying to define what the camp is today. It is not quite as easy as saying anything denominational is the camp and anything non-denominational is outside the gate. It is nothing like that.
There are some denominational people more outside the camp, and some people outside denominations who are in the camp. These are shallow kinds of things.
But when you follow the Lord, you find that you become someone who must bear some reproach—bear some reproach because you are too simple.
You see something, and they say, “That will never work.”
You say, “Well, that is what I saw. That is what I am going to do.”
And so you bear reproach. You will forever have to be explaining why you go to a place that does not have a pastor, and all those kinds of things. If you follow the Lord, you may have to suffer all kinds of things.
But you share in the fellowship of His sufferings in doing so. We grow and become sons through these various kinds of things.
Through our lives, we live before the Lord, and through our lives, we face disappointments, failures, and things we thought were going to work that did not work. The church gets going well, then falls prey to attack in various ways, seems to dissemble, and things get shaken.
When you have a long history of that kind of thing, one of two things happens. Either you end up getting depressed and saying, “The whole thing is a devastation. Just listen to your radio at nine and three in the afternoon, where brother so-and-so will tell you why you should not go to church.”
“It is all a devastation. Do not even talk to me about that church. It never works. It never has. It never will. Every group I have ever seen has gone to seed in ten years.”
Or you come up with an answer that does not satisfy anybody but you and the Lord. That is: “But we see Jesus.”
He is our only hope.
He is our only hope for our own life. Here we are talking about bringing many sons to glory. Well, let us see—we have about three hundred prospects right here, and it is a long way to go, is it not?
We have tasted the wilderness dust plenty of times. Are we ever going to make it?
But we see Jesus. This has to be our hope. There is a Man in glory. He has made it in and offered us His great salvation: that when we run, He runs with us; that when we are going into glory, He carries us into glory.
We begin to live by His life, trusting Him as our full provision in everything.
We see Jesus.
It has been wonderful to be with you and have this opportunity to share some of these things. I know the Lord wants to bring us to sonship, and the Holy Spirit is working upon us even now toward that end.
May we cooperate with Him in these last days, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.