Morning. Well, this is early today. All right.
Our Father, we do want to thank You again for what You have done for us in Jesus Christ, for sending Him into the world for us, that He might die and bring us back to You. Lord, we want to just tell You thank You. Sometimes these are just the only words we have, just to say thank You for doing such a great work.
Thank You for searching and finding us out where we were and bringing us to Yourself. Lord, we want to thank You so much for our salvation in Jesus.
Now we ask, Lord, that You would speak to us from Your Word. We give Your Word to You and ask that You will speak to us, strengthen us in the inner man, and help us that we might walk with You as we should walk, and that we might be pleasing to You.
Lord, only You can do these things. So we ask for the ministry of Your Holy Spirit to come and take Your Word and break it to us, encourage us, and help us to walk with You. In Jesus Christ’s name.
I have been speaking the last few times about the last letters that the apostles wrote. We talked about Paul, and we went through 2 Timothy. We did 2 Peter, and now we are looking at the apostle John.
I just want to say that this is not a word-by-word study. It is not a big study—just how these things have struck me. The reason why I did this was because, at one conference, we were talking about being in the last days. It made me think: what were these men saying in their last times? What did they have to write to people? What would they say? What is the importance of that?
That is why I started to read and look at these things. Last time, we started to speak about John from the epistle of 1 John, and I want to close that off today. This will be the end of my thoughts and meditations on these things.
Last week, we looked at John himself and said that he was the last of the twelve apostles alive. By the time he wrote this letter, Peter and Paul had already been martyred. They had been martyred somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years prior to his writing this letter.
So he really was the last of the apostles, the last of those who had walked with Jesus in that type of ministry.
We also asked: who was he writing to? It is about A.D. 90 to 100, and his audience is not just first-generation Christians. This audience also includes second-generation Christians and third-generation Christians.
That is why he says to fathers, to young men, and to children. He mentions them all.
Another thing we want to say is that, during the time he was writing, there was no persecution. It is much like today. Here we have a lot of first-, second-, and third-generation Christians. We have no persecution. We are living really nice.
The last thing we want to say about John is that people always say it is significant what someone was doing when they were called. For example, Peter was called while he was a fisherman, and he became a fisher of men for the Lord. David was called to be king when he was in the sheepfold, and he shepherded Israel.
John was called while he was mending nets. People say that this is significant because here we see John in the same kind of vocation: he is mending nets. He is trying to stop things from being lost before he leaves and goes to be with the Lord.
Last time, we talked about one of the things John was trying to stop from escaping: the importance of fellowship. I always look at fellowship first as personal fellowship. This personal fellowship and communion was threatened with being lost.
The Lord had been gone. The Lord rose sixty years ago. The message could, we say, be old. So something was being lost.
If we ever lose personal communion and fellowship, what does that do to the corporate? It makes the corporate merely a form. So it is so important that we have this personal communion and fellowship with the Lord.
Many people say that John was very much a mystic. We gave a definition of a mystic: a person who seeks to obtain union or communion with God by spiritual contemplation and self-surrender. He seeks it because he believes he can have it.
Brothers and sisters, it is the same for us. We are to seek out this fellowship, this communion, not because we cannot have it, but because we can have it. It is given to those who seek after it. But do we seek it? Do we seek diligently? We need to seek diligently for it.
It is this union and communion that John is trying to stop from being lost. We talked last time that this fellowship, this union, is our joy. Remember, we talked about joy being something deep, and communion also being something deep.
I can only think that it is these things that helped those people throughout history who were in prison, who were taken away, who were locked up. It was that fellowship, that communion, which kept them through those times of darkness. Everything else was taken away from them.
But they knew the Lord because they had communion with Him, and they kept that communion with Him. That communion with Him was what kept them through their time.
I often think, when Mac did his messages on Joseph, how Joseph must have had some type of communion with the Lord to keep him during those times. The Lord had given him some hope through His Word, that even though the Word might have been taken away, Joseph clung to it to get him through.
I know I have shared before about one of our friends who suffered a breakdown, I think in high school. The thing that kept her through that breakdown was all the memory verses she had learned from Sunday school. That kept her through those times and got her out and through it.
To lose this is really to lose our purpose, because our purpose is to know God—to know Him in that one-on-one situation, not to know Him through another, but to know Him personally.
That is one thing John, I think, was saying in the last days: do not let this be lost. I believe this is one thing the Lord really does want to recover. How can He come back to a people who do not love Him?
You cannot love Him if you do not have personal communion with Him. He becomes unreal to you. It becomes something that is just something you do. The Lord really wants this recovered in our lives.
Today, we said last time that John mentioned a number of times, “I have written to you” for these reasons. Last time, we said that your joy may be full—again, joy made full through communion with Him.
The verse for today is 1 John 2:1:
My little children, these things I write unto you, that ye may not sin.
One of the very last things John has to say to people is, “I am writing to you that you may not sin.” I want to put sin in its real context. The Greek word for sin actually means “to miss the mark,” like you are aiming at something and you miss—kind of like my free-throw shooting.
You think you have got it, and you miss the mark. But that is really what we are talking about. We are not just talking about, “Oh, do not do this or do not do that or do not do the other thing.” It is: do not miss the mark for which you have been redeemed.
God has redeemed you for a purpose. It really is to glorify Him, to serve Him forever, and to enjoy Him. John is saying, “Do not let that be taken from you. Do not let that goal be smeared so that you miss it.”
Things can draw you away—personal sin or this or that—but the whole thing is: what are the things that make you miss the mark?
During this time, there were teachings in Ephesus and in Turkey—the Gnostic teaching—that said it really does not matter how you live your life. It just matters what you know. If you know God, that is all that matters. You can live however you want because it is the knowledge of God that is going to get you through.
That is a lie, because the knowledge of God is to have an effect on you. If you know who God is, it is going to change the way you do things. It is going to change the way you think. It is going to change the way you live your life.
He is not just giving a blanket statement: “Okay, everybody is saved. Now go ahead and do what you want.” God has a purpose for us, and the purpose is wrapped up in fellowship with the Son. We cannot be moved away from that purpose.
We talk a lot about grace. I think what happens is that when we talk so much about grace, we kind of lose the idea that there are some responsibilities we have as Christians.
I have been a teacher for over twenty-five years, and as a teacher, you can see how kids now expect something from you. They have lost the idea that you have to work for something.
It is almost like, “I expect an A from a class.” Well, why? “Because I am attending. Because I come to the class, I expect to be nothing lower.”
They expect everything is going to be done for them. “Well, you did not tell me that was going to be on the test.” Well, did you do your reading? “Well, yes.” What was in the reading? “But you did not tell me.” Well, did you read? “Yeah, well, I read, but you did not tell me I was supposed to pay attention to that.”
You are laughing, but this is true. This is one of the reasons why, when kids go to college, they say, “Well, I never learned how to study,” because they expected everything was going to be done for them.
As Christians, I think we get in the same type of way. We expect that everything is going to be done for us. And we say, “Christ is everything for us.” Then all of a sudden, we get this idea that we do not do anything.
Listen to this verse. This is probably one of your favorite books in the Bible: Titus.
Titus 2 gives a good definition of grace, because it goes with Strong’s Concordance’s definition of grace:
For the grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men,
instructing us, to the intent that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world;
looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;
who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity,
and purify unto Himself a people for His own possession, zealous of good works.
We do not look at grace like that a lot, do we? But grace does call for a response. It is not just being given something; grace calls for a response from our heart.
When you do not realize what grace is, you get mixed messages. Remember when Jeffrey was talking about forgiveness? He talked about that one man in the parable Jesus gave in Matthew 18. He was forgiven a huge debt, and then he went out and throttled someone who owed him five bucks and put him in jail.
The whole idea was that he did not realize, he did not see, the grace given to him. If he had seen the grace given to him in the forgiveness of that huge debt, how would he have reacted to the one who owed him five dollars? It would have been a lot different.
Grace called for a response. This man thought, “I have to pay it all back. I have been given a reprieve.” Otherwise, why would he want five dollars from the other guy? Even in his response, he says, “I will pay you back everything.”
Somehow, we do not feel that grace wants a response. Grace always wants a response. That is why it is given. It is given to get a response in us.
It is just like love is given for a response. If I act in love toward you, I am hoping that you will respond in a like way to me. Is that not what it is all about? Love begets love. We want love back. We love.
Yet we are coming into a generation that is saying, “Well, everything—I do not have to do anything.” That is a real danger, because if you do not have to do anything, then you are going to do what is before you. What is before you is the world.
What has happened is that Christ has become a religion. Religions can get very boring. They can get to be, “Well, I do the duty here, but somewhere else I will do what I want.”
There is a danger in that: just keeping the form and then living another life when you are outside the places where you worship. John is coming against that. He says, “I do not want you to miss the mark,” because part of the mark is responding to the Lord.
You will not hit the mark if you do not respond to the Lord. John says, “I am writing to you that you will not miss the mark.” Then he gives us instruction about not missing the mark.
How do we not miss the mark? This is going to sound, in some ways, harsh, but bear with me. Back in 1 John 2, beginning with verse 15, John says:
Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.
If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof:
but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
There are two things in these verses that I really want to aim at. First, John says, “Do not love the world.” What is the world?
I do not want to spend a whole bunch of time on this, but let us just look. The word is kosmos. It is not the earth; it is the cosmos. What is the cosmos? The cosmos is an organized system that acts as a rival to God. It finds its proper sphere and fulfillment in a finite order without God.
This is found in Genesis 11. This is Babel. This is exactly what Babel was: “Let us build a tower up to the heavens and make a name for ourselves.” We do not need God.
Is this not the very lie that caused the fall of man? “You do not need God. Once you eat of this fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, you will be like God. You will not really need Him.”
This whole system is based on that. It is just a world that does not need God. It is living as though there is no God. That is what many people do today. They live as though there is no God because God does not matter. What matters is me and what I make out of my life.
It is very existential, is it not? Very existential. The purpose in life is what I make out of it. Reading existentialism was the very thing that drove me to the Lord, because I said, “What can I make out of my life?”
William Barclay quotes C. H. Dodd, who said that this system is organized on wrong principles that are characterized by base decisions, false values, and, lastly, egoism—self-rule. “I am king. I am the master of my domain.”
This is what the world is. John says, “Do not love that. Do not love that system. Do not love the things that are in that system.”
The things in that system, he says, are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. All he is really saying is that it is a heart set on a material world and getting what you can without any restraint on you. That is it.
Do not set your heart on those things. Do not love those things that look beautiful, but in them are nothing.
What is it like? It is like biting into something that looks really good and finding that it is full of air. Remember those chocolate Easter bunnies? You look at those chocolate Easter bunnies and say, “Oh, I cannot wait to sink my teeth into those,” thinking they are solid chocolate. “Oh, this is going to be good.”
Then you bite into it. First of all, you feel it and say, “This is kind of weird. This must be the light chocolate.” Then you bite into it, the whole thing cracks, and it is full of air. All of a sudden, you are disappointed, going, “I thought this was something that it was not.”
That is what the world presents. It presents something that is not. It gives a view of things where you look on the outside and say, “Oh, this is what I am searching for.” Then you touch it, and it turns to dust.
Then you see something else, and you touch it, and it turns to dust. Some of us are like we go to a carnival and just go from booth to booth to booth, never realizing that they are all the same.
John says, “Do not love these things. Do not go out to try and make a name for yourself. Do not love a place where truth is relative.”
What do I mean by that? Relative truth means it changes with the years. “Well, we used to think this, but now we do not anymore because times have changed, so now this is the new truth.”
If truth is relative, what does that make God? God is changeable. What happens to any standard? There is no standard you can go by.
But God is the truth. God is true. He is the standard. He is not relative. He does not change. That is our hope. That is what we set our faith in: God does not change.
John is saying, “Do not set your heart on these things.” Some of us just think, “Everything is now legal.” Well, just because things are legal does not make them good.
It is legal to smoke at eighteen, but smoking will kill you. It is legal to have a gun at such-and-such an age, but having a gun can kill you. They do not tell you that stuff. Well, they do—they have the little thing on the cigarette packs now: “It will kill you.” But it is really small. Truth in labeling—real small.
The other thing is that 1 John 5:19 says that the whole world is in the lap of the wicked one, or in the sway of the evil one. Everything in the world is under his sway.
The whole thing about our enemy, the evil one, is that he does not want you to have what God has planned, what God has paid and bought for you. He does not want you to have it.
This whole thing about the world is like the third temptation of our Lord, when Satan took Him up and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world. He said, “They are mine to give You, and they are Yours if You just do me homage.”
“They are Yours. All You have to do is give me that nod, give me that wink. I will take it.”
G. Campbell Morgan mentioned in The Crises of the Christ that Satan did this to prevent the accomplishment of the work for which our Lord had been preparing and for that which He had been anointed to do.
The whole thing of this world is to get us off the mark of what the Lord has prepared for us—for all those who love Him. We have no imagination of the fullness of what He has for us.
But this world is trying to get us away from the idea that, yes, that is going to be yours, or you can have that, but that is for a later time. What about now?
John says, “Do not love the world, because if you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you.” I can look at that two ways. I can look at it as, in my heart, there is no room for the love of God. There is no love for the Father in me because I am loving something else.
I can also look at it as the love of the Father is not in me because I am so selfish and I cannot love other people as the Lord would have me love them.
John says, “Stay away from these things.” The Lord’s answer to Satan was:
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.
You cannot serve two masters.
The question is really: how do I turn away from the world? I only have a three-step plan for you. Now, you cannot give a three-step plan, can you? It has got to be at least five.
How do you turn away from the world? What the world tries to get your attention with is that it glitters.
Have you ever seen the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart? You do not want to admit it. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, they are hunting for gold. The guys are mining for gold.
Humphrey Bogart and one of his friends come into this place, and they find this vein of glittery stuff. They are so excited. They are going, “Oh, we are going to be rich. We are going to be rich.”
Then an old miner comes by and kind of snickers at them. He says, “That is pyrite.” They say, “What?” He says, “Yeah, it is called fool’s gold. It looks like gold, but it really is not. It is just pyrite, a cheap imitation.”
All of a sudden, they are saying, “Oh, man,” because they thought they had struck it rich.
What turns us away from the glitter? Tell me. You have to see something that you think is of more value. That is basically it. You have to see something you think is of more value.
I am glad my wife chose to marry me. Of all the people she could have married, she picked me because she must have thought that I was of more value. You know what I mean?
I can tell you the same thing about my wife. I saw in my wife something of more value than other people I had thought of. It is not just a pretty face. It goes deeper than that.
When you think of when Jesus came—our Lord Jesus came upon the earth—what does it say about Him?
For He grew up before Him as a tender plant,
and as a root out of a dry ground:
He hath no form nor comeliness;
and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.
In other words, He was not what we would call “the stud.” People looked at Him, but it was not as though they said, “I want to follow that Man because, look, He is just good-looking and charismatic.”
He was not that. He was a humble carpenter. What was it that He had? There was something in Him—who He was. It was His character that shone out from Him, that grabbed people and made people want to come to Him, stay with Him, and follow Him.
It is the same with us. We have to see the Lord as being of more value. I cannot tell you how you can do that except that you have to search for it. You have to ask.
You have to say, “Lord”—you have to be as bold as Moses was—“Lord, show me Your glory.”
The Lord will not chide us for asking things like that. What did He do for Moses? He hid him in the cleft of the rock. He said, “I will let you see My glory.” He let him see it.
When you come down to it, Moses was a man just like you and I. People say, “Well, he was Moses. He obeyed and everything.” But when it came down to it, first of all, he was just a man like you or I.
The Lord had a purpose for him, but Moses also had to seek out that purpose. The Lord had to go after Moses. The Lord had to show Moses things. Moses finally did come out.
He almost had to be dragged out from where he was with his father-in-law Jethro in Midian. He was saying, “Oh, send my brother. Send somebody else.”
But as he was going out and coming out, he began to see the Lord for Who He was. It is those things that carry us through.
I will give you one other example from my life. I wanted to be a basketball player so badly. So badly. And I was good—there is the pride of life. Okay, that is the pride of life.
But my senior year, I sat on the bench. I was all-everything my junior year in college. My senior year, I sat the bench. I thought, “Oh, I am done with this.” But I wanted to be a professional so badly.
I was offered an opportunity to go on tour with the Globetrotters, and I took it. I prayed about it, too. I remember getting counsel, and Floyd told me, “Well, I do not really think this is the right thing for you to do, but you have got to make your own choice.”
I went out there, and here we were nothing. But you go overseas and we were the second-greatest team in the world. Now, that was before basketball was a worldwide thing, before they had European leagues and everything.
As a matter of fact, when I went to New Zealand, I was recruited to stay in New Zealand. They promised me a car and a wife if I would stay in New Zealand and promote basketball for the 1976 Olympics.
When I was in New Zealand, people were asking me for my autograph, which I thought was really funny. I sat the bench in my senior year in college, okay? They had no idea. They thought there was something else.
You had all the things that a professional athlete could want. You had fame and notoriety. People were flinging themselves at you. They wanted to do you favors and everything like this. And I was miserable.
I shared this in Toronto last year. Here I was, in New Zealand. It was ten o’clock at night, and the sun was still shining because it is on the bottom half of the world and it was summer. I was just crying.
I felt like I did the wrong thing. I had chased after this, and there was nothing.
The thing that made me cry and made me miserable was that, right before I had decided to go on tour, I had first started to walk with the Lord and first started to fellowship with some people. All of a sudden, I started to realize that was much more valuable. That was much more desirable than what I had.
That is what made me realize. But it was not like the Lord said, “Well, Jim, sorry. That is it. You chose your way. We will see you.” No, the Lord was very gentle with me. Very gentle.
He brought me back, and it was there that the Lord started to reveal things to me for the first time. When the Lord gets you alone sometimes, He is able to do things that He cannot do when you are with people you know and are familiar with.
He gets you alone, just like He got Jacob alone, just like He got Joseph alone, just like He had David alone. He gets you alone, and then He shows you something of Himself.
That is the only way we can get away from the trap of the world. You have to see something of more worth. We have to understand this: the things that we think are glorious, sometimes they are just shiny objects.
You have to look hard. That is our responsibility. Our responsibility is to seek Him out. “Lord, let me find the value that You are to me.”
We sing, “You are like a precious jewel; to stop following You, I would be a fool.” But how many of us are fools? If He is a precious jewel, we should be seeking Him to find Him.
It is only through seeking Him that we will find Him, because He says:
And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.
That is His promise. That is a promise to us. He says, “Love not the world,” but in order to love not the world, you have to find the Lord. You have to see Him for yourself. That is the only way you will not love the world.
You cannot do gymnastics. You cannot just say, “I am not going to do these things,” because even in saying, “I am not going to do these things,” there is egotism right there. “Look what I do not do.”
Is that not Paul? “I do not do this. I do not do that. I do not do the other thing.” What does he say in the end? It is all dung—nothing. It does not count as far as knowing God.
If I seek Him and find Him, that is what changes my life. That is what changes my values: to see Him as He is and to see Him unfolding. It is not a one-time thing. He unfolds.
Secondly, the last part of 1 John 2:17 says:
But he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
“He that doeth the will of God.” It is a matter of will. The first thing, we see, is a matter of heart. Is your heart being stolen away, or is it going to be ravished by the Lord? It is also a matter of the will. It says, “He that doeth.”
Oh my goodness, what does this do to grace? This helps that definition, does it not? “He that doeth.” Grace—there is a response to grace. He who does the will.
You know that God is looking for works. I know that sounds really different for evangelical people to say, does it not? We can read, “It is not your works that do these things,” but God is looking for works.
He is looking for works of gratitude. He is looking for works of devotion. These are works that do not attain anything, as if they earn you something. He is looking for a response to what He has done for you.
He is looking for that work which says, “I love my master. I will not go out free.” That is the bondservant type of thing.
I have struggled with this—the thing that God is looking for something in my life. It is not something that saves me, because only God’s work saves me. But it is something that brings me further into knowing Him, and that satisfies His heart.
Like Steve said last time, he wonderfully did justification. Justification has brought us to a door, brought us in the door, and given us access to everything.
Now what are we to do? Sit at the door and just go, “Wow, sure is a lot of neat stuff”? Or are we to come in and find out what it is that God has for us?
We have access to this grace, but we are only going to find out how much further grace goes by doing things.
The verse I want to use here is 1 John 2:3:
And hereby we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.
There is an obedience here that the Lord is looking for in us. These are works of obedience, not just works of obedience that say, “Here is a list of things; go do them.” There is an obedience that comes out of a relationship.
Let me show you something about these works. I read this and was flabbergasted. In Revelation 19, verses 7 and 8:
Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory unto Him:
for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready.
And it was given unto her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright and pure:
for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.
Ephesians 2:10 says that we are created for good works in Christ Jesus, prepared beforehand. Here it talks about the bride’s gown: the righteous acts of the saints—linen.
I was puzzled until I looked up how to make linen. Have you ever looked that up? I tried to get this so I could put it up on the screen, because it had some nice little pictures. It has a thirteen-step way of making linen.
First of all, when we think of righteous acts, what do we think of? We think of maybe feeding the poor, clothing the naked. You think of the Lord separating the sheep from the goats.
But then I think we can get into this works-oriented thing and miss the whole point of works of righteousness. What are works of righteousness?
I will tell you basically what I think works of righteousness are, and then you can either throw it out or say, “Well, maybe it has some merit.” I think works of righteousness all begin by our bowing in, by our saying, “Thy will be done.”
Any works that come out of that are works of righteousness. Any work that does not come out of that is righteousness that is filthy rags.
Linen is made out of flax. Flax is a straw-like plant. The first thing that has to be done to the flax after they reap it is that they take it to be rippled.
Rippling is where you take the flax through little fingers to remove the grain heads and fuzzy stuff at the top. It is called rippling.
Really, this is like the offerings of the Lord. When the Lord talked about a bird offering in Leviticus, before they offered the bird, they would take its crop off—not its head, its crop.
Picture a cockatiel. What do people notice most about a cockatiel besides its big beak? It is that crop of feathers here.
If you took that crop of feathers off the cockatiel, what would it look like? A bald cockatiel. It would look just like a regular bird. All its glory is gone, because its glory is in that big crop of feathers.
Rippling is taking away all our pretense of who we are and everything, just saying, “Lord, I have nothing to offer You. I do not have anything. I thought I had all this stuff. I thought it was something good, but I am not. But I still give You who I am.”
The Lord has to ripple us, because as we walk with Him, the Lord has to show us that we are nothing. We all have these ideas that we are something.
Even here, I sat on the bench my senior year in college, right? But I was thinking, “I should be in the pros. If my thumbs were only bigger, I could palm the basketball. I would be a lot better. If I only had the right breaks, I have the talent.”
Oh, that has to be stripped away. You have to see yourself for where you are and what you are. You are just a person, a sinner at that, ready to be thrown away. You have to see yourself like that. So the Lord ripples you.
Then you have to be retted. I learned this word from crossword puzzles. You ret flax. You know what you do when you ret flax? You stick it in water.
Why are you sticking it in water? Because you want to get the hard side off of it, and the water softens it up so you can take the hard side off.
To me, the retting is the washing of water by the Word. You have to be in the Word, because it is the Word that separates the soul from the spirit.
Just like the old things have to be loosened up to come off, you do not know that they have to come off until you start reading the Word. The Lord starts speaking to you about things. All of a sudden, He starts working on you and loosening those things up.
Then there comes a part called breaking. All that means is they take the water and squeeze it out. Sometimes the Lord just does that. He wrings us out after we are all wet. You have got to be wrung out so the rest of the stuff can be done.
Then comes what is called scutching. I always wondered what scutching meant, because we used to have a picture of it in our history book: “This is the scutching bee.”
A scutching bee is where people take these little wooden tools—not really mallets—and beat on the retted flax after it has been dried. What happens is the outer core, the outer thing they want to get off, comes off.
That is like the taking off of the old man. As it says in Ephesians, put off the old man and put on the new man. As we see that the old thing has to be put off, and as we are made willing to do that, we take off the old man and put on the new man.
Then comes a part called hackling. Hackling is, again, almost like rippling, except now you are taking the finer parts and getting out the finer things.
As we go on with the Lord, there are things we do not see because the old stuff is on top. But as we go on with the Lord, He starts refining us, getting down to the nitty-gritty and the other parts—attitudes of our life, things of that nature.
When you have done that, then you can spin it into thread. When you have spun it into thread, then you can be woven with other thread into a garment.
When it says, “the righteous acts of the saints,” I think of what the Lord is asking from us: just to bow the knee and give ourselves to Him. That is what He wants.
He does not want us merely to do this or do that. He wants us to bow the knee so that, when He puts something on our heart, we do it. It is not some list, again, where we are trying to do something to please the Lord.
We please the Lord when He says, “Do this now,” and we do it. That is when we please the Lord. That is righteous.
What we find out, really, is that when all that stuff is cracked off, what is being shown is Christ in us. We find out that that is the thing God has been after all the time. He has put Christ in us, and we have not even known it.
He puts us through these things, and we find out, as these things start to tear away, that Christ is there. It is Christ in us that is woven in. It is how we are woven into one another.
Remember, Paul says we do not know anybody after the flesh, but after Christ.
Just a couple more things I want to talk about as far as this idea of obeying. In 1 John 5:3, it says:
His commandments are not grievous.
Usually, when we think of it—especially as kids—anytime my dad told me to do something, what was I thinking? “I cannot watch TV. I have got to do this. I cannot play basketball. I have got to do this. It is grievous to me. I have got to do that. I wanted to go to the game with you, but my dad says I have got to weed.”
No, it says the Lord’s commands are not grievous. I think we think, at the beginning, that they are grievous, because anytime the Lord asks us to bow our knee and do His will, whose will is crossed out? Mine.
At first, I am going to be miffed. I am not going to really say, “Oh, why do I have to do this?” But in the doing of it comes the revelation, and comes the joy in doing the Master’s will.
You find out, “Oh my gosh, what the Lord has done through this.” Or you might not find it in the doing, but later on someone might come up to you and say, “You know, when you did this two years ago, what that meant to me…” All of a sudden, you see something. It was not grievous.
Romans 12:2 talks about the doing of it as proving what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. It is good. It is perfect. It is acceptable.
We read in 1 John 2:3 that we know Him through keeping His commandments. Through our obedience, that is how we get to know the Lord. What do I mean by that?
Take Jonah, for example. Jonah was told to go to Nineveh and preach. He said, “I do not want to do that. Nineveh is my enemy.” So he left. The Lord brought him all the way back, and finally he did what he was asked to do. He was still upset.
Remember, he goes up on the hill and says, “I am just going to watch to see if God destroys this city.” Then God made a plant come up and shade him. Then He had a worm come and eat the plant.
The Lord asked Jonah, “Are you mad?” Jonah said, “Yeah, I am mad.” The Lord said, “Well, why? You did not make the plant. Why are you mad?”
Then the Lord says, “If you care for a plant that you did not even make, how much more do I care for these people that I made?” To think that Jonah thought God should not save them.
What did Jonah find out? He found out God’s heart for these sinning people.
What about Peter, when God sent him to Cornelius’s house? Peter said, “I should not go here. I am a Jew. You are Gentiles. We should not be here.” What did he find out? He found out that God accepts the Gentiles too. He found out how big God’s heart was.
But you only find those things out by doing what the Lord asks you to do.
What about the attributes of God? How many of us are going to find out that God really is all-knowing? You are not going to find out He is all-knowing until He sends you out to do something.
You say, “Well, I do not have the thing.” He says, “Just go. I know what is ahead of you.” You will not find out until the doing of it. Then you say, “God knew this all the time.”
Or the power of God to do something—you will not know the power of God until He sends you out. I always think how hard it must have been when Jesus sent out the seventy. “Go into these places and heal and do these things.”
What would you have been like in the first town when they brought the first sick person to you? What would you have done? “Peter, this one is yours.”
No, but they laid hands on people because the Lord told them to go. Then they saw that God is all-powerful. But they would never have known it had they not obeyed.
Obedience is our way of getting to know who God is. These are things we do. It is not just laid out so we say, “Okay, God is this,” and then we are satisfied with the knowledge.
“Okay, God is omnipotent, whatever that means. Oh yeah, I believe that God is omnipotent.” But believing and experiencing are different. We have to experience these things to strengthen our faith.
The Lord will have all these things for us to strengthen us, and so we get to know Him. He does not start with big things. He always starts with little things. Little by little, we grow into these things.
This is what He wants for us. John says, “I do not want you to miss the mark. I do not want you to miss what God has for you.”
These are the things by which we can find out what God has for us. We do not love the world. We seek Him and say, “Lord, show me Yourself, so I will not miss the mark. Show Yourself to me.”
Charles Wesley has a great hymn, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” There is a verse in it that says, “Take away the love of sinning.” How do You take away the love of sinning?
You have to see something that makes you love it more than the sin. You have to see something that makes you love it more.
Then we have to do things. We have to obey His commands. His commands are not grievous, and His commands are the commands that come out of relationship. You see, all of this goes back to relationship.
If we do not have a relationship—a living relationship—with the Lord, then we will not know what we are to know, and we will fall this way or that way.
But our relationship with the Lord will lead us into relationship with other brothers and sisters and will build up the body.
You have to put first things first. This is what John is saying: do not lose these things. You second- and third-generation Christians, do not let it settle down into, “This is just a teaching. This is what we have been taught. This is what has always been. This is how we do it.”
I think Jerry said in our prayer meeting, “God has no grandchildren.” That is true. But there are those who would be grandchildren.
You know what I mean by being grandchildren? Grandchildren love Grandma and Grandpa. Why? They get anything they want. They do not have to do anything.
That is something you who are second- and third-generation Christians have to fight against: “Everything is going to be given to me.”
You have not because you ask not. You have to seek the Lord for these things. “Lord, break me out of that. Let me come to the place where I see You for myself and fall down and worship.”
That is what the Lord is after. That is what John is trying to say: do not let these things slip. We can become a form, even groups like us. We can become form if we do not have the living relationship with the Lord Himself.
That is what John is trying to fight against. Let us pray.
Our Father, we want to thank You that You never come in just to scold and say, “Well, you should be doing this or that.” You always come and say, “My child, I just love you, and I want to direct you.”
Lord, we want to be directed. Forgive us where we fall short. Forgive us where we love the world, and help us. Lord, we cannot help ourselves in our old nature. We are sinners that love the world.
But Lord, You have given us a new nature, and we need to exercise it. You need to help us. We ask that You would show us more of Yourself.
Help us to be in positions where we will be seeking You instead of waiting for it to come to us like it is going to fall like manna from heaven.
Lord, help us be like Isaac and dig the wells of his father until he finds water. Lord, we want to dig up wells that become artesian wells, that start pumping out and flowing out.
Lord, we want to have that type of experience. We want to see You in that type of way, that we have those rivers of living water coming out from our bellies, like You promised the woman at the well.
Lord, we want these things. Teach us to come to the place of saying that we have got to do some things.
Lord, I know it just sounds so foreign to us because we hear grace all the time. But Lord, this is grace: that You have these things for us if we just come after them.
Lord, we ask You like Caleb’s daughter: You have given us land; we are in the land. But give us springs. Give us those springs.
We ask this in Jesus’ name.