For it’s there my spirit speaks with Him.
Lord, we do pray, and thank You even for those moments in our life where we’d rather be with You and be doing the Father’s business more than anything. How we thank You for Your preciousness, how You capture us—sometimes out in the woods, sometimes out at the falls, sometimes in some beautiful setting.
Just a sense of Your presence creeps upon us, and we’d like to remain in that wonderful sense. Sometimes after busyness, and retiring back into our hiding place, it’s so sweet.
And even in the crushing moments, as life is seemingly squeezed out of us, we sense the fellowship of the Lamb. Oh, Lord, these are deep and mysterious sensings in our heart, and yet we pray that You’ll make them more and more a reality in our lives as we go through this everyday world.
We know we can’t be just living from mystical experience to mystical experience. But we thank You for special times when, drawn aside, we have a moment—just a moment—to be shut up with Jesus, with nothing else to interfere.
Oh, what blessed moments these are. We pray that You would make this moment, even tonight, a continuing in that blessed presence as we’ve known throughout this day. Lord, help us by the Holy Spirit to understand more of Your perfect will for us. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray. Amen.
As you know, we’re sharing about the time Jesus came to the temple at twelve years old. I have received a bunch of things regarding the temple in those days. I just wanted to show you them so you get the idea.
I don’t know what you think being in the temple is like—if you think it’s like being in the White House in Washington, D.C., or something like that. But this is just outside Jerusalem in the time of the Passover. You can see the almond trees are budding.
When Jesus came into the Temple Mount, now you’ve got to understand that behind there—if you look behind—is there everything? How did he do that? The arrow? What is it?
Oh, put it on a table. Ah, yeah, yeah. Macintosh, you don’t have to do that. Anyway, okay. So here we are.
Now, you see, Jesus and His family would be down—now, this is glue from a huge board that this model is made on, and it gives you no idea of the fact that there’s a descending valley there that goes down for hundreds of feet. The people would have stayed down in the valley, and they would have made their way up here toward this wall in order to come in here. They would come right up these stairs.
So, next picture. Here you see right here, and you see how large the Temple Mount is. And these are little people here. You see these little things? Those aren’t Weebles; those are people. Okay?
Yeah, they are going up the stairs, and then they’re going through these gates. And look at this: when you come in, you come in here. So you’ve gone all the way here, underneath, and up right in here.
Now, this isn’t really even the temple. This is the Temple Mount. It was the mountain where the temple was. See, the city—it’s part of the city. It’s in the middle of the city, or not really, but, you know, that’s good enough for now.
Here is where they bought sheep and doves, and this is where Jesus chased out the money changers, right here by this gate. Having come in, they go through here, take their sacrifice, and go back down in the basement, where those sacrifices are taken to the place of the offering.
But just to see the size of this thing—see, now here’s where they came up through the gate, and here’s where you go through this next gate, and here’s where the animals were bought and sold. And you see these columns right here. Okay?
Jesus went into this colonnade as a twelve-year-old boy, compelled by the interests of the Father’s business. He walked down this hallway here, as scary as it may seem. It’s an open thing.
And here is where the folks are meeting and talking about the things of God during those remaining four or five days of the feast. Here they are in session, and there we see Jesus right there.
Well, these are Weebles after all. We don’t really know quite what the story is. But I just want you to see what we’re talking about—where He was and everything—just so you kind of get an idea of how huge this whole complex was.
This, you see, here’s the little gate where they come up out of the place. And then here they come, and here is what we think of as the temple. This is, in fact, the holy place, and there’s the Holy of Holies. This is the outer court right here.
And all the rest of this is—you know what this is? The Court of the Women. They had these huge lampstands in there, which they lit up at night. And, you know, the Jewish women could go in there.
So it was in that court, right in here, where Jesus was dedicated when He was eight days old. Okay? But the women could only go thus far. Into that next court there, called the court of the priests, was the place that the men could go.
Jesus went with Joseph, carrying the Passover lamb for the sacrifice, and so they would go in there. Then the men could stand up on the second floor, hear the story, and look; also under the colonnade here, on the first floor, where they could see what was going on.
But here is where the laver is—you know, I mean, the brazen altar and the laver right over here. As you see, here’s the laver where they washed up. Here is the brazen altar, and this is called the shambles.
When your house is a shambles, it looks like the place where they’re slaughtering animals. That’s what that means. And so the lamb would be put over here, waiting its turn.
Now you see four little cute fires burning here on this altar. There were over two hundred thousand lambs sacrificed at Passover in Jesus’ day. I mean, offered and sacrificed—the parts of them. You understand, the family got back a lot of it, but not to go into all the details.
A lot of smoke, a lot of lamb smell going on there. Oh man, I love lamb smell. It’s a succulent smell. Anyway, the priests are busy. You better believe every priest who’s got a smock is working overtime. It’s a really, really busy time.
And then here are the priests, and they’re looking into the holy place. But we can’t go any further because you’re not Jews. I can’t show you the rest.
There’s just a picture of the temple at night. Here is the Court of the Women lit again, and here is the temple. It was a tremendous thing. I mean, you can imagine Jesus, as a twelve-year-old boy, seeing this for the first time—if indeed that was the case.
So, I just wanted to show you those pictures. Then, to show you why the silent years—God, in His wisdom, did not flesh out Jesus too much. And you can imagine why. Why would that be?
Because if we knew He had a hook nose, we’d worship hook noses; or brown eyes is all you can possibly do if you’re a good Christian, and so on. People just worship things.
And so Luke records this picture, this background, this wonderful picture of Jesus as a twelve-year-old boy, but doesn’t go into such detail, because you can see why.
Now, here are pictures of people’s conceptions of what Jesus looked like. There He is with the little halo, like all of you have, you know. Do you think that’s what Jesus looked like?
Now that’s what Jesus looked like, right? I don’t think so. Looks like He comes from Wisconsin.
Ah, there He is—the famous picture of Jesus. And, of course, the doctors of the law are writing down everything Jesus says. There’s something fake about that right from the get-go.
But there again, I don’t know. Now there He looks a little more Irish, perhaps. Still, I’m not getting the witness here. You see what I’m saying?
Ah, no. There’s a modern rendition. Yes, further and further from reality, as you can see. What do you think? No, no. It looks like something in Star Wars or something.
Now, this guy is depicting Jesus actually in a play in Germany. We won’t go into it, but what do you think? No, no.
How about this guy? Now, Jesus may have looked the most like this kind of guy, except Jesus would never carry a cat because He’s a holy person. We know better.
And all of that to say: now, wouldn’t it be terrible if we actually, in the Bible, had a photo of what He looked like? Then He would be the Jesus of the Sephardic Jews, or people would somehow—you see?
So we have a picture in our heart’s eye of what Jesus is like, and this is enough for the Lord, and it’s enough for us.
So, having done that, we will now look into the Word. If you’ll turn to Luke chapter 2, let’s just read the half of this phrase we’ve been looking at through these days.
We’ll begin in Luke 2:46, because now we’re going to look at the relationship of Jesus and the Word at twelve years old in the temple. Here we have it clearly stated.
Then after three days they found Him in the temple,
sitting in the midst of the teachers,
both listening to them, and asking them questions.And all that heard Him were amazed at His understanding and His answers.
And when they saw Him, they were astonished:
and His mother said unto Him, Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us?
behold, Thy father and I sought Thee sorrowing.And He said unto them, How is it that ye sought Me?
wist ye not that I must be in My Father’s house?And they understood not the saying which He spake unto them.
And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth;
and He was subject unto them:
and His mother kept all these sayings in her heart.And Jesus advanced in wisdom and stature,
and in favor with God and men.
Keep your finger in there, please, and just turn to John chapter 13, at the very beginning of the chapter. Here we see Jesus just before He goes to the cross, and you see His conscious awareness of who He is taken to its fullest extent.
Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour was come
that He should depart out of this world unto the Father,
having loved His own that were in the world,
He loved them unto the end.Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands,
and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto God.
Well, Jesus there, at the end of His earthly ministry, has a great awareness—self-conscious awareness—of who He is in the Father’s business and what role He has to play.
But we want to ask this question tonight: Jesus, at twelve years old, how conscious was He of His mission? How conscious was He of His calling? And how conscious was He indeed as to who He was?
Now, frankly, we can’t answer that question because it has not been spelled out. But we can surmise some things, even from this little passage here, this little snapshot that Mary gives us of Jesus at that turning point in adolescence, where He begins to lay hold of His calling and His place in the Father’s business.
Mary takes note and treasures this moment in her heart. How far along had He gone? How deep was His consciousness?
Now, we know the first thing, and perhaps the most important thing, from this answer of Jesus in Luke chapter 2: He knew that He and the Father were in an intimate relationship together.
He was beginning to receive most of His relevant information from His Father in heaven. Now, that is a crucial point in a person’s life. We receive information from a lot of different sources, and a lot of it is helpful.
Jesus studied the Word of God, and we’re going to look at that tonight. But it’s because of His relationship with the Father in heaven that He was able to understand the depths of the Word.
And it’s our encouragement that this twelve-year-old boy, being able to do that, shows us that we also, if we will consecrate our hearts to the Lord and walk in an abiding relationship with Him—abiding in Him and abiding in His Word—will come to a profound understanding of the calling we have on our lives and the business that God is about at the present time.
We know by His baptism—and so that would be about thirty years of age—that Jesus by that point knew He was the Lamb of God. He knew He was the suffering Servant predicted in Isaiah 53.
We know that when He came out of the water, John the Baptist even prophesied and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” Jesus knew this already in His heart, because when He came from baptism, it symbolized His death that He would die on the cross.
So, spiritually speaking, though this may seem hard for you to understand, He walked three and a half more years on earth before He went to Calvary, but He actually was walking in death. This was His calling. He was born to die for the sins of the world. He had seen it clearly.
But do you think He had seen that clearly at twelve? Now, I don’t think He did, and I’ll tell you why: because the Father leads a man in a progressive understanding as we are able to bear it.
A twelve-year-old boy does not grasp what it means to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But it was, in fact, that which happened at this Passover that began, perhaps, to awaken some of the intuitive understanding that Jesus had in His life—that there was some calling, some Passover calling.
That’s why the Passover was so vital and important to Him. But we know, of course, by the time He was baptized, He knew He was the Lamb of God. By the time He went to the cross, as we read in John 13, He knew that He had been with the Father from the beginning.
But so much we don’t know, and it’s left silent because silence teaches us a lesson. The silent years, with this one little snapshot, tell us something. And what is that?
Outwardly, Jesus led a basically normal life, just like you. For those thirty years, He worked in a carpenter shop, and He had to do this and that. Family emergencies and things came up, all kinds of responsibilities. He was still a student. He was still learning. He was growing up. He was taking care of His younger brothers and various different things.
The silence shows us that there was a normal outward life that He was living, and there’s no need to give you anecdotes. So don’t believe a bit of that stuff that comes from the Gospel of Thomas.
That Jesus made birds out of clay, breathed on them, and they fluttered off; and one of His friends pushed Him on the street, and Jesus killed him. It’s in the Gospel of Thomas.
As a matter of fact, Mohammed, in writing the Koran, mentions these stories about the sparrows being made alive by Jesus. But you know something? It doesn’t swing with me.
In these silent years, Jesus did not make clay birds come to life. He lived a normal outward life. But things were ticking inside. God was preparing Him.
The Father’s business was being worked out while He was there at home, submitting to His family and doing the various responsibilities. The Father’s business at this stage of His life was this: prepare Yourself for Your calling and for Your destiny.
We don’t know, therefore, the things that were coming to light in this visit to Jerusalem at twelve years old. Because Jesus was different from us, obviously. A human being without sin can understand a lot more of the things of God than sinners can.
And so, His heart being pure, His faith being real, and His relationship to the Father being intimate, the Word—even when He heard it in the synagogues—was being turned into living understanding by Jesus.
So we know that the Word was developing in His life. He was understanding things as the scrolls were read in Nazareth.
We also don’t know how much Mary told Jesus about the circumstances of His birth: the amazing miracle of His birth itself, the coming of the Magi, the report of the shepherds regarding the angels, the flight to Egypt, and all such things.
We don’t know how much Jesus was told by Mary, or whether she continued to treasure these things in her heart. These things we really don’t know.
But we do sense that Jesus, by the time He got there to Jerusalem, definitely understood by the scrolls that Israel was central to God’s business, that Jerusalem was the center of God’s testimony, and also that the testimony of God was in ruins.
Now, a clear-minded heart and clear, intelligent eyes didn’t have to look around much in Nazareth to see the corruption there among the Jews. Nor in Jerusalem did it take Jesus long to sort out the fact that there was all kinds of compromise, far, far from the purpose of God.
Can you imagine being a boy growing up, reading the scrolls with all the promises of what would happen to Israel—about the promises of those final days when the glory would be in Zion, and people would resort to it, and there would be all kinds of healing and teaching and light?
People with problems from all over the world would be coming to Zion. I mean, what a beautiful picture. But then, can you imagine what happened when you showed up in Zion—the real Zion?
Now, there are even some people looking forward to one day visiting New York. Well, it’s great, but when you actually get there, hmm, there are some things you didn’t count on, you know?
So we are trying to sense what it is that Jesus understood at this age of twelve, because what we will see is that there is a progress in His understanding.
Is there a progress in your understanding? Are you developing an understanding of the Father’s will, of the church, of your place in the church, in your calling, and all of these kinds of things?
Then once again, we want to look at Jesus and see Him as He stood in relationship to the Word of God.
As I mentioned—and even wrote a question this morning, which I understand stumped or worried some of you—at what feast did you realize the turning point in your life?
This feast was a turning point in Jesus’ life. Something was triggered there when He got to Jerusalem. There was a compulsion. There was a hunger. There was a beginning of a clarification that compelled Him to spend some extra time with the men who understood the law.
And so He lost all sense of time in His devotion to God’s will, and thus we found Him there in the temple. It started a lifelong quest to do the Father’s will and to be occupied in His business.
And you know something? That’s what the Lord wants for you. Maybe this summer youth conference is your Passover.
It’s the time where you, who have grown by the grace of God since the moment of your salvation, find an aggression in your heart by the grace of God to start to lay hold of the Word of God, to start to find out what it is that you’re called to, what it is the Lord wants you to do.
Maybe this is your time. Maybe you’ve already had such a moment in your life, and you’re now on the road of advancement. You remember we made this difference between natural growth and advancement, where somebody lays hold of this process and cooperates with God.
Well, you know what? If you have begun on that, I know that you’ll have fits and starts. You’ll go and you’ll grow, and you’ll seem to stagnate. You’ll get preoccupied.
Now you’re going to college, and it takes a while for your gyroscope to get reset. Then it gets set, and you’re all good. Then you graduate from college—there goes the gyroscope again.
And then, you know, where’s north, south, east, west? I don’t know. What’s God telling me to do? I don’t know. I just got to work fourteen hours a day.
Then you get married, and then, oh man, now your gyro really goes. Oh boy. Oh, now I can’t even think by myself. Where’s that little stool I used to sit in the corner, and used to have my time with God? No more. Now you got Henry.
Oh my goodness, the gyro. What was that? So, you see, we go and we pursue, and we pursue, but I know you’ll have interruptions. Life happens.
Distractions, family matters, change of venue, all kinds of things. But that’s the whole point, you see. What you’ll find that you have within, if you’ve been captured in this way of advancement, is that buoyancy will pop back up to the surface, and there you go again, pursuing the Father’s business.
Oh, when you get captured, you know, sometimes the old buoy—you know, Lance had a whole thing about the buoy this summer, but we won’t go into that. You’ll be bobbing up and down a lot on the sea of life, but the deal is you always pop back up.
Because you’re running after Jesus to know the Father’s will.
So, we looked last time at this matter that the Father’s business starts in the heart, right? If you don’t have a transaction with God where you surrender your whole heart to God, there’s not much forward progress.
You might catch religious fever. Summer youth conferences are known for this particular disease called religious fever. It happens when people say, “Oh Lord, I dedicate everything to You. I dedicate my jeans, my guitar, my sandals—everything. I dedicate it to You.”
And by September, “Lord, can I have my sandals back?” Religious fever. It lasts for a little while. It may be good for young people, but you know what? When you’re really captured, it’s no longer a fever. It’s life, and you’re pursuing.
But beyond the heart being caught, which is really what we were talking about last night, the second thing we want to talk about is this: the next vital lesson we learn from the twelve-year-old Jesus is this:
The next step in our advancement toward the Father’s business is to have a living, vital relationship to the Word of God.
And specifically this—I want to put this, because as soon as you heard that, you said, “Oh yeah, yeah, I know about that. It always comes, the message about the Word of God.”
This morning you got all of the Chinese food and the hamburgers and all of that about the Word of God, and now tonight you’re going to get some salami. You know, I mean, this never ends: the Word of God.
No, no. Listen to this specifically. What we see in Jesus at twelve years old is that He had a vital relationship to the Word of God in dialogue.
That makes all the difference. Now, many people are happy just to sit back and take in the Word of God like this: “Okay, I got to read Philippians 3 this morning. It’s my devotional time. Okay, I got to go.”
Now, many people have devotions like that. “Okay, I got that information. Saved. Okay, now I go to work.”
But what if you had a little dialogue with the Word of God? It would make all the difference in your life.
For Jesus, relating to the Word of God was a dialogue. Just look at what we found there in this story in Luke chapter 2. There were three things noted with astonishment about Jesus.
The first thing you do in dialogue is you listen. The second thing you do in dialogue is you ask questions. The third thing you do in dialogue is you answer questions.
Now, that’s good dialogue. That’s a living relationship to the Word of God. You’re asking questions of the Word of God.
Now, at this point, if you truly enter into Word-of-God dialogue, you should probably do it in your quiet time alone, or people may cart you off. Because what you’re actually doing is talking to your Bible.
“Now, wait a minute. What does that verse mean? Now You’ve got to tell me. What does that word mean?” Ah, you’re in dialogue.
You can hear the horns in the background: doo-woo, the ambulance coming. “Oh boy, guy’s way off balance now,” you see.
There are four things that happen when you enter into dialogue with the Word of God.
Number one: the truth is underlined and clarified by rehearsal. Now, you’ve got to picture this. You’re getting up in the morning, and I’ll just mention this for a second because you’ve had so much stuff about devotions—maybe even as a workshop today, every day about devotions.
But I’m going to suggest a fifteen-minute devotion that includes dialogue. I know you’re trying to read the Bible through in a year. That’s a great thing. Do it in the evening.
I want you to read. Maybe you have a chapter, and you’re going to do Luke chapter 2 today. I want you to read only as many verses as it takes for you to stop and have dialogue.
How many verses does that take? Sometimes the first verse, sometimes twelve, sometimes fourteen. Sometimes you get through a chapter and there’s no dialogue going on. It’s probably because you were lazy.
I mean, there was no question to ask the Bible in that whole chapter? There’s nothing to say, “Oh, that’s amazing. You know what? I think that happened to me,” or, “That’s never happened to me”? Some kind of dialogue going on. You see, this is very important.
Number one: the truth is underlined and clarified by rehearsal. Not only the eye gate, but the ear gate, because you speak it back.
I told you one time—I’m sure I told you this example—but there was a godly man who was staying in a room right across the hall from me, and we were in a conference together. This godly man was in his eighties, and I’m in my bedroom ready to go to sleep, and I hear, “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”
So finally I go over there, knock on the door, and say, “Excuse me, are you okay?” He said, “Oh yes, of course I’m okay. You know what? There’s this verse here in the New Testament. I don’t know what it means, so I told the Lord I’m going to walk back and forth till He explains it to me.”
There’s a brother in his eighties. He’s in dialogue with the Word. That’s exactly what that is. That’s living.
It underscores something in your heart. You know, you won’t be so likely to forget that verse if you’ve spoken it, read it again, rehearsed it. Right?
Secondly, what happens is when you find this phrase that arrests you, or this sentence that captures you, or just that thing that says, “Hmm, that’s interesting,” and then you do a further search and go to other Scriptures, it deepens into another dimension—a second and third dimension—the truth that you have just seen on the surface in your initial arrest.
What a wonderful thing to do a little word run on your computer of something that has caught your attention. It’s amazing what you might find.
Number three: if you have a dialogue in the morning with the Lord, it gives you some provision, some rhema, that you’re likely to either use during the day, find helpful during the day, or even have something to meditate on during the day.
So many of our saints here in New York City, you know, they’re riding the subways, and they get their little devotion. Then on the subway, you know, it’s a little hard to read—you’re getting seasick.
But you know what? If you’ve got a sentence lodged in your mind that you just kind of memorized and regurgitated and thought about a little bit, you can meditate on that during your twenty-five-minute ride to your destination.
“Hmm. Hmm. I’m gonna have a little rhema bit this morning. Let me think about that, that I just read this morning. Hmm. Is He?”
And then you’re growing, and you might find you get to work and you’ll actually be able to use that verse because somebody needs help. You say, “Hey, isn’t that funny? Strangest coincidence. I just read this verse this morning.” Wonderful.
Number four, of course: it enables the Word to be written in your heart.
Thy word have I laid up in my heart,
That I might not sin against Thee.
David says. It’s by such recitation and by such a dialogue. It’s a wonderful thing.
So, in the morning—I almost have to say this about morning devotions—I think it’s good to pray before you read this portion. It’s good to have a little journal so you can write down.
Maybe write down the sentence and put a big question mark by it because you have no idea what you just read. That’s where dialogue starts.
The Lord catches your interest. That’s what He was doing to all the people when He gave them parables. He was just giving them a little hors d’oeuvre: “How do you like that? The kingdom of God is like—try that.”
“That’s good.” And then they followed Jesus. Such a bunch of suckers.
And if you’ll go to living—the Word is a living Word of God—you get this little thing going: “Now wait a minute. Now wait a minute.” He’s caught you. He’s got something, something that will increase, something that will grow in your life.
But I don’t like it when—you know what I’m saying? Don’t go on some marathon thing, okay? Some of you, if you do an hour quiet time, I have no problem with it. I’m just talking about the first bit of dialogue.
If you’re going to read a bunch of chapters, that’s great. But, “Hello, Lord, I met You in the Word this morning.” There we are. Something’s transacted.
I’ll never forget: I was a Christian less than a year, and I met this wonderful minister of God named Stephen Olford. He was a famous Baptist preacher, and he’d written a little pamphlet, which he gave to me free. I was very impressed by that.
It was called Manna in the Morning. It’s just a little ten-page pamphlet, you know, like this size, about the importance of getting together with the Lord and actually talking to Him, having Him talk to you.
See, many times by the Word of God, you actually have a dialogue with the Lord. So important, so important. And so we learn this lesson of the preciousness of a morning devotion.
Now, I bring this up because I want us to sort of imagine—and I guess this is pretty much what we have to do because we don’t have the facts—imagine how Jesus dialogued with the Word as He went to Jerusalem for the first time.
Can you imagine what happened to Him when He saw the Passover lamb sacrificed? He’d never seen it before, or perhaps He had heard stories.
Of course, you can imagine in your mind, because you knew what sheep were like out in Nazareth and Galilee. But to see it actually happen, and to hear the purport of it, the importance of it—that this sacrifice of this Passover lamb saves a whole household.
Perhaps that was one of those things that compelled Jesus to get before the rabbis and find out further the significance of the Paschal lamb.
And then how about the blood? To see that blood gushing, to see the blood around the altar—it’s a bloody mess. Two hundred thousand lambs. There’s a lot of red juice going on there.
But the significance of the precious blood, and the life in the blood, and the whole thing. To some people, these are customs. To Jesus, there was something living going inside.
Imagine being the Passover Lamb, watching the Passover lamb. Something intuitively inside says, “This has significance with Me.”
And I’m sure when He went to those doctors of the law, He was saying, “Well, what does this mean? Why is this?” And they were amazed by His intelligence, His perception, His looking at the details.
It’s because He felt this word of the Passover lamb had very much to do with Him.
And then what about the unleavened bread? These three feasts came one day in a row. The Passover is one day, the Feast of Unleavened Bread is the next, and then comes the firstfruits.
And then what about the firstfruits, and waving that barley, and the first signs of resurrection life? What’s that all about? Was Jesus sensing already that He would be raised the third day as the firstfruits?
As literally happened when He was crucified as the Passover Lamb? You see, these things may be just la-la-la to us, just doctrines and types from the Old Testament, but to Jesus they breathed life.
And so He was dialoguing with these matters. He was thinking about the feasts and the meaning of them. They were beyond type. There was something living He was trying to become aware of.
You see, He had those intelligent eyes. He had that pure heart. And He had that relationship to the Father.
Every time He thought about the Word and then saw something fleshed out before Him, it had an impact on His life.
I remember, it was 1975 when I went on my first trip to Israel, and I was privileged to have Lance take us around for three weeks with just twelve people.
Now, until you’ve been to Israel, you read the Bible: la-la-la, names and places don’t mean too much. You see Galilee—yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s just like Loon Lake. Nah.
When you go to Israel and see it, it does something to you because you realize, “Wow, this is what the Bible’s talking about.”
Now, can you imagine Jesus going to Jerusalem and saying, “Wow, this is what I’ve been reading all My life. Here it is.”
And so His questions and His probings and His compulsion went deeper than just these matters of the Passover, I’m sure.
Just think about this. Here He is developing the Father’s eyes. Because He’s in such a relationship with the Father, He doesn’t just look at things on the outward; He’s beginning to develop the Father’s eyes because He’s saying to the Father, “Father, what is that?”
And surely, when He came to the temple, the house of God, and saw all of the stuff going on—the choirs and singing, the money being made selling the animals, and all the busyness and busyness and business—Jesus had been studying the Word, studying Isaiah 56.
Jesus’ response to that house of God somehow was, “Is this the Father’s house?”
You see, because Jesus saw everything in terms of the Father. He didn’t have a sense of His own calling, whatever level He was at, as just some calling. It was something that grew out of His relationship with the Father.
So He’s looking at the temple, and everybody else—remember how the disciples, even at the end of the three and a half years, said, “Wow, look at this golden temple. Isn’t this the most beautiful possession of Israel? Isn’t this the most wonderful testimony of God’s greatness?”
And Jesus says, “My Father wants a house of prayer for all the nations, and you’ve made it a den of thieves.”
You see, Jesus had eyes. And I’m sure there at the temple He was at once amazed and overwhelmed, and then He took a second look, and He began to yearn that the Father’s house would be what it was meant to be.
My dear brothers and sisters, I suppose you think you go to the Father’s house every Sunday. Have you ever looked at the condition?
Has there ever been some question, some compelling, some dialogue about it between you and the Lord? I don’t mean to criticize. I don’t mean to say, “Ah, you know, so-and-so, he can’t preach his way out of a paper bag. The worship is terrible. We sing the same old dreadful songs. Oh, I wish they’d burn those hymnals and start over or something.”
I don’t mean that kind of stuff. And you didn’t find that in Jesus because, don’t forget, with Jesus’ pure heart, He was given to reverence and not criticism.
But He sure had dialogue with His heavenly Father about the house of God because in His heart He was beginning to see the Father’s house.
In fact, He, at the end of His life, realized, “I am going to prepare the Father’s house for you.” But in those early days, perhaps He wasn’t completely clear about His role in that whole thing.
But He knew the Father’s house had to be more than just this huge system cranking away.
I wonder what it would be like to be Jesus, a twelve-year-old boy, and to watch King Herod walking by in all of his corrupt, sinful living.
I mean, Herod was a testimony of absolute corruption, and yet he was the king of Israel—not even of the house of Judah.
And as that corrupt king sallied around in the high holy days with all of his entourage and all of his fine things, perhaps being walked around in a van because he’s too holy to have to walk—just a real corrupt and depraved man.
What do you think it would be like to be the Son of David and to see the person who is on the throne?
I wonder if that didn’t bring some kind of burden to Jesus’ heart. As a matter of fact, thinking about the whole city being the city of David, do you think Jesus had any awareness that it was His city?
I don’t think He did. But I think He felt intuitively. You see, there was something intuitive within His calling: “This is the Father’s. This is the Father’s city. It’s My city.”
The true King at twelve years old, looking at this caricature of the Jewish king—things rising in His heart. “There’s something wrong with this picture. Who is that? That’s not David. That’s not the Son of David. That’s not the heart of David, the mind of David.”
Oh, I can’t imagine this twelve-year-old boy. He was certainly going deeper than He ever thought would happen when He visited Jerusalem.
And then, of course, the most pitiful part of the whole festivity is that, although they may have swept it under the carpet, as it were, Jerusalem gathered around itself all of the poor and the broken and the maniacs and the jobless and the lepers and all.
You couldn’t go through the valley on your way up to this beautiful city and not be touched by the busted-up people.
And Jesus, having this pure and loving heart, who would give a nickel to everybody He found if He could—what do you think was rising in His heart in those days?
Perhaps He had read Isaiah 9, about how those who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and the gospel has come with healing in its wings.
Do you think even in those days, at twelve years old, there was this desire to say—could you imagine how foolish it would sound for a twelve-year-old boy to say—“All of you who are weary and broken, come unto Me”?
But there was something inside of Him. He was destined for that call.
Now, when I say deep was calling unto deep when He was there in Jerusalem, these are the kinds of sensibilities. It was way beyond His understanding, and yet things were being clarified.
And you see, it took the remaining eighteen years of silence to then step on the scene with that gospel that says, “I’m bringing good news to the poor in spirit and to those that mourn and are brokenhearted.”
Something was begun as He pursued and realized His purpose was to bring good news to broken people.
So when He stepped on the scene, don’t you think He stepped out at thirty years old and said, “Okay, Father, now what should I preach today?” That sermon had been working in His heart for eighteen years.
That wonderful Beatitudes, when He stood up there and blessed those people so much that they forgot that they were there for three days without eating. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Wow, nobody called those poor people blessed before. The way He blessed little kids, little poor, snot-nosed, dirty kids—He blessed them. He looked beyond all that stuff, all that poverty.
All those broken people, all those outcast lepers, the whole bunch of them, He could bless. His life was to be a blessing, a poured-out blessing.
But you can imagine what it would be to have that sensibility at twelve years old. You’d have to wait and learn—learn the gospel, and learn how to be the gospel, and learn how to be that Savior, that Messiah, who comes out into the world.
I mean, these things—we have no idea all that was going through His mind. Perhaps these things only happened years beyond, but I know one thing: with His earnestness and His simple faith, and being a Father-pleaser with passion and simplicity, He was shaken when He saw what was going on.
Now I am praying for a generation of young people who have a heart and a passion and a purity to be trained in years of preparation, to see what God wants, not just man.
To be able to differentiate and distinguish the things that are—the systems established, the customs being employed—and what really is the Father’s heart.
And that’s you, perhaps.
But I know just as surely as I know your heart needs to be altogether given to the Lord, I also know that we right here in this room need to repent of our attitude to the Word of God.
People all over this world—there’s millions of people hungry to hear the Word of God, and we have three versions gathering dust on our shelves.
I remember a few times ago in Russia—you know, I go out there once in a while—and a few times ago in Russia, I heard the story of a sister. They had a vacation Bible school.
They went out to this very, very, very remote village. It was just log cabins, no road, dirt road out there. She held a Bible school for the kids—perhaps forty or fifty kids in this little village.
She would have a Bible school, give them a sucker, teach them a story, and they’d sing a song. None of them were Christians; none of them even knew what the words were about.
Well, they had rented a little cottage there for the summer. At night she had nothing to do, so she invited the next-door neighbor to come over, and she would just read the Bible to this lady.
Well, that one night, by a week later there were thirty-five people at her house every night. What she did was read the book of Romans, and over thirty people got saved—just hearing it.
She would read a sentence, and people said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What does that mean? What does that mean? You mean whether you’re religious or not, you have a conscience and you’re before God about it?”
I mean, it was brand new to them. They were hearing it all as virgin territory. It was such a wonderful thing.
Just by a woman. She wasn’t a preacher. She wasn’t an evangelist. She was just reading the Bible and explaining it. Thirty people got saved. There’s such a hunger for the Word of God.
But we need to repent of our attitude toward the Word of God. We do not clutch this Word to our breast as if it’s our very life food. We can talk the talk, but I’m talking about really dialoguing with this thing.
If we would be a generation who understands the Father’s heart and the Father’s business, we need to understand something.
Here’s what we need to understand: the Word of God becomes living when we realize it is attached with an umbilical cord to the Lord Himself.
Don’t you ever think this Bible is just a book. It is directly connected to the Lord Himself.
And here is the extent to which this is true. Again, I’m talking about dialogue, but here is the way I’m going to put it: you talk to it, and He answers.
Now, did you hear me? You want to know how living this Word is? You talk to it, and He answers.
Because when you have talked to it, you have talked to Him.
I know this is just pages with words written on it, but oh, it’s so much more. This opens prison doors. This heals people. This raises the dead.
But it comes when people believe that they have before them a living Word and not just some instructions.
Speak to it. He will speak back to you. And repent of ever coming to that Bible in such an attitude that you don’t want to hear, and you’re just reading some stuff because you’re supposed to be doing the customary thing.
No, don’t let it be there.
Listen, the wonderful story—when you hear the wonderful story, I mean, you know, we have these heroes of the faith. We trot them out every once in a while because they’re wonderful people.
Like C. T. Studd. You know who that is? No? No? Huh? He was a wonderful person, though you guys didn’t know about him.
Well, anyway, he was a great missionary to China, India, and Africa. There’s a wonderful book written about him called C. T. Studd: Cricketer and Pioneer, or something like that. It’s a wonderful story.
And you know what? This guy believed every word in here.
Our brother Jim was talking about his favorite author being F. B. Meyer, this guy who wrote and spoke such flowery, wonderful sermons. He really is a great sermonizer, a real preacher.
F. B. Meyer’s life turned around when he met C. T. Studd back then in about 1885. They were in the same place together, and at 4:30 in the morning—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—you hear somebody walking around.
Of course, it’s C. T. Studd. And F. B. Meyer, you know, being a preacher, he doesn’t get up before seven. And so he said, “Hey, what are you doing here, Studd?” That was his name.
C. T. Studd said, “You know what? I got my Bible open because I’m checking to see if there’s any commandment the Lord wants me to keep today.”
He literally meant it. So when he got his one hundred twenty-five thousand—or whatever it was he got for an inheritance; I think it was one hundred twenty-five thousand pounds—he gave it all away.
You know why? Because one verse in the Scripture he read, and the Lord said, “Go, sell all that you have, and follow Me.” He did it. Sold it. Everything.
Just read the Word. Believe it.
Now, anybody here know of Bakht Singh? Ah, three guys. Okay, good. And they all look Indian, strangely. Bakht Singh was a famous Indian apostle. They don’t look Indian—come on.
Bakht Singh was a famous apostle, an apostle of India, a tremendous man of God. And you should read his biography. It’s out there. You can read it because you will see in his biography that he literally took the Word as God speaking to him.
It saved him from death. It delivered him from sickness. It helped him to speak on just what the Lord wanted. He read the Word, found the phrase, and said, “God is speaking to me in these three words,” and it changed his life.
That’s how literally they depended upon the Word of God—that it is a general guide, as a living, breathing, dialogical Word of God.
And dear brothers and sisters, the Lord wants us to be that way as well.
I leave with you just some bones to chew on, knowing that every good dog likes a bone. In case anybody wants dialogue on a particular thing, I’ll give you a starting point.
Something that Paul considers one of the highest requests as he prays to the Lord—he mentions it in Ephesians 1. I just want us to finish up by looking at that verse, and I leave it with you.
I’m going to suppose if you just start laying hold of this verse, it will take you several years to dialogue with this verse.
Ephesians chapter 1, verse 18, is the actual verse, but there are verses around it that are important.
God has something He wants to do with us, and that is this: not only teach us truth, but teach us the truth as it is in Jesus.
So if you listen to this prayer, beginning in Ephesians 1:17, Paul begins to give the substance of the prayer:
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of glory,
may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation
in the knowledge of Him.
Meaning Jesus. God wants you to know about Jesus by experience.
Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened,
that ye may know what is the hope of His calling,
what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe.
So that you will know three things. Ladies and gentlemen, would you chew on these things and ask God, “What on earth do You mean?”
Paul says you must know by revelation what is the hope of His calling. That’s number one. You have any idea what that is?
That has everything to do with your destiny. It has everything to do with your calling: the hope of His calling.
Number two: what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints? Can you get your mind around that phrase?
Chew it. Ask questions. Listen. That’s a tremendous revelation. That is very important in understanding our place in the body of Christ.
And then the third, beginning in Ephesians 1:19: what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe?
Oh, my dear friends, we may read that phrase and understand He’s talking about power, but I’m asking you: do you know that power? No, I’m asking you more: have you experienced that power?
And what I’m saying to you is that if you’ll dialogue with this Word before the Lord, you will receive power—this power. Not understanding in theory, but experiencing in Jesus Christ this power which the Lord has granted to you.
Now here are three wonderful bones for a dog to chew. Have you got some growl in you? Are you willing to lay hold of the Word of God and find out what these tremendous things are?
These are tremendous three things.
Oh, if we were such children that we would hang around and even forget about a little bit of sleep, a little bit of comfort, a little bit of TV watching, and a little bit of game playing—just start asking God. Just ask the Word, and God will answer.
“What does this mean? The hope of His calling. The riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints—what is that? And the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe.”
My, my, my. All to do with your future.
And in these preparation years, in these silent years, as God is preparing you for what He has for you at your proper time, it’s a good thing to repent of your attitude about the Word of God and to begin to lay hold of this—your very lifeline to Jesus and the Father.
Father, I just pray in the name of Jesus, the living Word of God, that You will prove to all of those who have enough faith to exercise in a dialogue the reality of what I am just speaking.
Now, Lord, we’re not looking for mystical experiences and craziness, but we do believe that this is a living Word of God that can do tremendous things in our lives.
But we need to find it in a living way, because it seems to be secondary to us and part of the whole Christian mix. Lord, we ask that You would give us a love relationship to this precious Word.
That we would hide this Word in our hearts. We would ask questions of the Word, have the Word ask questions of us, and in the midst of this dialogue hear the living God and begin to act in obedience to what the Lord speaks to us.
Enough of this guessing what it is we’re supposed to do. Oh Lord, we have Your living Word that will lead us according to Your will.
Lord, we repent of our neglect of the Word of God. We repent of our attitude: “Oh, I’ve read that already. I know what that means.”
We repent of our disobedience to the things that You’ve shown us.
Lord, we come in a context where things are shaking as much as they were shaking in Jesus’ twelve-year-old days. We come to the house of God in the city of God, watching things around us.
But oh, if we don’t have the light from the Word, we don’t know how to move forward. We’re just like the whole mass of people saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know. What should we do?” Nothing—passive.
Surely there must be a way forward. Oh, revive our hearts according to Your Word. So we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.