Morning, brothers and sisters.
Before we start, I want to thank the brothers and sisters from Toronto for again inviting me to participate in your burden. I am blessed because I see Christ working out His burden through you, and I bless the Lord for that. I thank you for the opportunity again to be here, and I know how you love me. I am so appreciative of that. Thank you. Thank you.
I have had, again, a blessed time—with the people I have met and with those people I have had to room with. It has been good. So may the Lord cap this off by making everything good.
Let us pray.
Our Father, we know that You are so worthy that You deserve our very lives. And You know that, in our deepest hearts, we want to give You our very lives.
You also know our frame. You know that we are but dust. You know how we get wrong ideas, how we try to do this and that, and how we come up short. How we thank You for Your patience, how we thank You for Your love toward us, and how we need to know, Lord, how You have provided for us in a way that You can be well pleased.
Lord, this is what we want to see as we look at things today. We do not want to look at things as being so far off. But, Lord, You have put something before us that we might see it, that we might desire it, that we might, as John said, have that hope that purifies us—the hope that we will be like You.
Lord, that is the hope that we want. We do want to be like You. Lord, where we fail is that we just do not know how to do that.
And so I ask, in some way today, as we leave, that we would not be caught up in saying, “Oh, I’ve got to do, I’ve got to do. I don’t know how I’m going to do.” But that we might have some rest in knowing that we are Your workmanship, that You are the One who is working.
Even as we read this morning in our devotion, it is You who is working in us to will and to do of Your good pleasure. Oh Lord, if we could just see that, get hold of that today, and go home with that hope, then we could rest—not worried that we must perform, but at rest, knowing that You have put in us that life which You intend to grow, and that You will give us everything we need to grow thereby.
Lord, we need Your Holy Spirit to open up the Word to us. We need Your Holy Spirit to fall upon us. We need Your Holy Spirit to empower us when we go home. We do not want to leave anything to ourselves today or when we leave.
And so we come asking: fill us afresh, or even for the first time, with Your Holy Spirit. Let us know that You dwell within us. We ask this in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.
No pictures today. Okay, sorry.
This morning, I just want to continue on the track that we have been going. We have been talking about, “I must be about My Father’s business,” and we have been looking at the life of the Lord. We have been looking at things that the Lord would want of us.
I know, for me, the idea of growing is something about being about His business. We need to grow. That is what He wants. And what we want to grow into is what we want to look at today. What is it that the Lord really wants us to grow into?
So, what is My Father’s business? I want to read Scripture from Mark to frame these things this morning, and then to go from there—to use this as a jumping point. In Mark 10, beginning with verse 17—and we will come back to this in a little bit—may the Lord give us light.
Now as He was going out on the road, one came running, knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?”
So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not bear false witness,’ ‘Do not defraud,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.’”
And he answered and said to Him, “Teacher, all these things I have kept from my youth.”
Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “One thing you lack.”
I want to stop right there.
Here we have a young man. We do not know how old he is; it just says he is a young man. We know another thing: he was a rich young ruler, one of those rich, well-to-do people. We notice also that he desires something. He desires something from the Lord. He desires eternal life.
That is really what he says: “What may I do? What must I do that I might inherit, that I might have, eternal life?”
The Lord asks him a question in dealing with it. He asks him about the commandments. He says, “Have you done these things?”
What I want to bring out this morning for our consideration—for our dialogue with the Lord, as was said last night—is the idea of what the Father’s business is. The Father’s business to us is not the keeping of these commands.
Even when this young man came and the Lord asked him, “Well, you know the commandments. Have you done all these things?” he said, “Yes, I have done all these things, as far as I can know.” The Lord looked at him, and it says He loved him.
But the commandments really are not something for us to look at and say, “I must keep them.” Then it becomes me trying to please God in my own self.
Instead, if we look at the commandments properly, the commandments are an embodiment of what man was meant to be in Jesus Christ. It is not that man was supposed to be an obeyer of the commandments; the commandments were to be a man.
It is an interesting way to look at things. When the Lord speaks in Ezekiel concerning the new covenant, He is saying that it is not merely commandments that you need. What you need is for Him to write something on your heart, so that you actually are the embodiment of the commandments.
Even Paul, in Corinthians, says, “You are our letter.” You are the embodiment of what we are preaching and teaching. So we do not need approval from anyone else, because we have you.
What, then, is My Father’s business? His business is this: to make a redeemed man. That is His business. That is the bottom end of it.
Jesus came into the world to save man—not merely to forgive sin. Now, that was a part of it, because man had broken not merely God’s command, but his vital relationship with Him. Because of that, he could never please God anymore.
But the Lord came not to give us new rules, not merely to forgive sins and say, “Okay, you’re on your own. Let’s get along and see how you do.” He came to redeem us—in other words, to make a new creation.
The old one just does not make it, and the old one can never become the new creation. That is something we will find out as we go along in life.
If the Father’s business is to redeem, to make a new creation, then I want to look at the new creation. We have to look at a goal. We have to have something to strive for. I am not saying that striving will accomplish it, but we have to see the goal. We have to see what it is that God is really after.
I know that when we see it, it is going to be so perfect that we are going to throw up our hands and say, “How can this ever become me? How can I ever become this?”
And, in a sense, that is what God wants. But He wants you to see His standard. He wants you to see His new creation. He wants you to have a hope of becoming that new creation.
Remember, hope is not, “Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish.” Hope is an expectation that I will attain.
It is a wonderful thing that Paul said. Paul, with all his great knowledge and all his life, says, “Not that I have attained. I have not attained yet. But, leaving the things that are behind, I go forward in pursuit of attaining.”
Brothers and sisters, I know that is what we want. We want to pursue. We want to do those things. The thing is, we get hung up. So before we get into the hang-ups, let us look at the new creation.
What is this man—this new man—that God has put in seed form in us?
This new man is in seed form already in us. The wonderful thing about that is that when it is put in seed form, it is never meant to remain a seed. It is meant to grow into a full body, a full one.
God does not put Christ in us to get half done. Just like when a woman becomes pregnant and knows she is with child, she does not just hope, “Well, I hope the child comes out to be at least two years old.”
No. The hope is that the child lives fully and becomes what he is supposed to be—a full-grown child. She is not simply happy in becoming pregnant, although that is a very great thing.
But I will tell you, after a while being pregnant—and I do not know this personally, but I have watched my wife—it is not fun. You wait, and you are waiting for that child to be born. It is a trial. But when it is born, you rejoice and forget the whole trial.
Sometimes you can laugh and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember how I treated you when I was in the delivery room.”
Incidentally, guys, when your wife is in the delivery room, arm’s length. Okay? Just a little hint for you. And do not ever say, “Oh, I wish I could just feel what you felt.” You will be in for a surprise.
There are six little facets as I look at the new man. Six is the number of man, so that is why I chose six facets. I did not choose them merely as facets; I chose them as people. I chose Old Testament people.
The Old Testament, you know, was the old man; the New Testament is the new man. But there was hope in the Old Testament of that new man coming. There was that new covenant. It is all there in the Old Testament, even from the beginning—from Genesis 3:15, the One who was going to come in and take the place.
The first one is Joseph. You can find the story of Joseph in Genesis 37–50. But I just want to deal first with Genesis 37, because Joseph had a vision—matter of fact, he had a couple of visions.
In these visions, he was above everything; everything bowed down to him. To be very spiritual, people would say, “Well, that is man in ascendancy, or the new man in ascendancy.” But I am not that spiritual, so that does not mean a whole lot to me.
But this means something to me: he had these visions for a purpose, because God had something to do with him. When he went through the trials that he went through, it was these visions and dreams that he held onto. All through his testing, they went before him and kept him.
Any time the Lord shows us something—something about what we are to be or what He wants for us—He never just leaves it there and says, “That’s it.” Then He says, “I want to test it. I want to bring it to pass.”
The only way He can do that is by testing us. Testing is not like saying, at the end of this message, “I have a multiple-choice test. We will pass out papers, and you have ten minutes to do it. If you pass, you will go on to the next stage.”
No. The way the Lord tests is through the refiner’s fire. You know the song you sing, “Refiner’s Fire”? Well, that is it.
When a person is refining something and puts it in the fire, the first things that come up are all the junk. That is why testing is so hard sometimes: we do not see what the Lord is after. All we see is the junk. We bemoan the things and say, “How can You do anything? It’s just junk.”
But the Lord knows what He is doing. Again, we are His workmanship. He knows what He is doing. Even as we read yesterday in that hymn, the wreck is in His hand. So we can have hope. We can have rest, no matter how tough we think it is going. He will bring us through, and He will get what He desires.
Joseph was faithful to this vision, and this vision purified him. As he was tested and came through, something happened to Joseph. At first, he saw himself as this great one that everyone would bow down to. Now, that really happened, did it not?
But by the time it happened, that was not what Joseph was pleased with. He would not say, “Oh, finally, I got the crown. This is really cool, man. Hey, bring my cherries over. Let’s go.” No. “Oh, how come you’re not bowing down? Get out of here!”
That is not what he was excited about, because he had seen something else in this whole refining situation.
Do you remember what the promise to Abraham was?
“Through you I will bless all nations.”
That is actually what Joseph did. Joseph came not merely to be Pharaoh’s helper; he became God’s instrument of blessing. It was not just his own family; it was the whole world.
Later, Joseph’s brothers were saying, “Oh, you know, sorry about what happened at the pit. Kind of a mistake.” “It was Simeon’s fault.”
Joseph knew it was Simeon’s fault, because who was the one he chose to be in prison until they came back? Simeon. I think Joseph remembered that thing. There were still some things that had to be worked out in Joseph, because later he forgave them all.
Maybe for a time he still had a little grudge, because Simeon was saying, “Let’s kill him.” At least Judah said, “Well, we’ll sell him.” He gave him some grace. But Simeon wanted to get rid of him altogether.
But when Joseph was talking to his brothers, he said:
“You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”
“God sent me before you to preserve life.”
God knew what was going to happen, and He sent Joseph ahead to save them—and, in that time, to save the world around the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, because there were seven years of famine.
God found Himself a man to do these things. Instead of merely being happy and saying, “Oh yeah, I’m above everything,” Joseph became a life of blessing.
The Lord wants us to have a life that is victorious, but He wants a life that blesses other people—in the family of God and outside the family of God. It does not matter, because God causes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust. God gives His grace. He does not give grace only to Christians.
Did not you and I, as unbelievers and sinners, find that He gave His grace to us? In that same way, He blesses, and He wants a life that blesses.
So one part of the new creation is a life that becomes a blessing because it begins to understand the purpose that God has for it. It is not merely to gloat over others; it is to save.
The second person I would like to bring up is Samuel. You will notice that many of these people are young people. I think that is important, because a lot of times we say, “Well, I have to wait until I’m thirty, until I can be a member of the Sanhedrin and the ruling body.”
That is not true. God starts at all sorts of ages. It depends on when you are receptive.
You can find the story of Samuel in 1 Samuel. It begins with his birth, but in 1 Samuel 3 it really gets onto Samuel. Then you have him all the way until he anoints David in 1 Samuel 16, and intermittently until he dies at the end of the book.
The first thing I want to say is that Samuel was dedicated to the Lord. He was given to the Lord.
You know something? We are given to the Lord too. Who gave us to the Lord? The Lord Jesus Himself gave us to the Father. He is the One who has come before the heavenlies, before that temple in the heavenlies, and presented us faultless and dedicated us to His Father.
In the same sense, we have been dedicated. Remember, Hannah gave Samuel and said, “I give you to the Lord forever.” When we think of the Lord Jesus giving us to the Father, He gives us to the Father forever.
He does not take us back. He does not say, “Oh, geez, I didn’t think about him. Sorry, Dad. Throw this one out with the rotten fish.” No, He brings us all.
There is a wonderful verse at the end of Jude that says He is able to present us faultless before the throne.
But Samuel was not merely dedicated. There had to be a response. When we are saved, it does not mean that all of a sudden we become whatever He wants. There has to be some time when there is a response.
Samuel made a response when he was a young man. In 1 Samuel 3, he finishes his work in the temple and goes to bed. Then he hears a voice calling him. He runs to Eli and says, “Here I am. What do you need?” Eli says, “I do not need anything. Who called you? Go back.”
It happened three times. Then Eli recognized it and said, “You know something, Samuel? That is the Lord calling you. The next time you hear it, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.’”
What is this part of the new man that we see in Samuel? Besides being dedicated, he has an ear that is able to hear the Lord.
In Exodus, when it speaks about the dedication of the priests, the first thing they anointed on the priest with blood was the ear. Because without the ear, you do not have the thumb or the toe.
To give you an example: when my dad had my ear, he had my whole body. You get my drift? Dad has the ear, he has the whole body. But he has to have the ear.
I am not saying that the Lord drags you around like that. But Psalm 40 is a Messianic Psalm. Psalm 40:6 says:
Sacrifice and offering You did not desire;
My ears You have opened.
Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require.
Then I said, “Behold, I come;
In the scroll of the book it is written of me.
I delight to do Your will, O my God,
And Your law is within my heart.”
The thought is that He has dug out my ear. He is not talking about using Q-tips. The picture is that of a bondservant. When the bondservant said, “I want to serve you forever,” the master took him to the doorpost and, with an awl, pierced his ear. He opened up his ear.
That showed everyone that he was serving freely. This was his freewill offering because his master had shown him so much love that he did not want to leave, even when offered freedom.
It is like when Jesus, after feeding the five thousand, began speaking about the bread of life. The people said, “This is hard. This is too hard for us to take,” and many left.
Jesus turned to the disciples and asked, “Will you also leave?” Peter said, “Where would we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
That has to do with the ears, does it not? You have the words. When we listen to You, when we hear You, we hear God speaking.
This new man is a man whose ear has been opened, and who has learned to hear. But the Lord does not want hearing only. In the Psalm, it says, “I delight to do Your will, O my God.”
Hearing must be connected with something. Just like the priest whose ear was touched first, then the thumb and the big toe were anointed. What is He saying? “I want to obey You. I want to serve You with my hands. I want to have a walk worthy of You with my feet.”
I can only do this if I can hear You speaking. Otherwise, I am left to myself. Then we go to the traditional things and say, “Okay, I go to Bible study. I do these things.” We offer heartless sacrifices because our hearts are not in it. We have not heard Him.
It is when we hear Him that our hearts are ravished. You cannot say, if you have heard the Lord in some way this week, that your heart has not been stirred. Any time you hear the Lord speak, you are stirred—if you hear Him.
Now, you can hear words, but when you hear Him—that is why Jesus said, “He who has an ear, let him hear.” We all have ears, do we not? What did He mean? He meant he who has had that ear dug out and can hear the voice of God—hear it and respond to it.
That is what Samuel did. The result was that he brought in a whole new era in the economy of God. He ushered in Israel’s first king.
Brothers and sisters, it is the same with us. When we hear the Lord and begin to respond, we usher the King into our life. If we bring the King into our life and into our assemblies, there is hope that the King will be in the assembly that we are in.
Samuel ushered in a whole new era because he heard and he responded. Samuel had an open ear to the voice of God.
The next one is David. You can find David throughout 1 Samuel, beginning around 1 Samuel 16, all the way through 2 Samuel. You will also find him in 1 Chronicles, after you get through all those genealogies—which you love to read during your devotions, do you not?
What about David? David was chosen by God. God chose David specifically.
When Israel’s first king had departed from following the Lord, God said, “I will search and find a man after My own heart.” So He found David. When He found David, David was in the sheepfold. Some say he was a teenager.
That was when God came, chose him, put that calling on his life, and anointed him. David lived in that anointing even though he did not become king for another seventeen or twenty years, because Saul did not want to give him his place.
It is the same with us. We have two natures in us. We have a Saul nature and we have a David nature. The David nature is the life of Christ in us; the Saul nature is us. The Saul nature never wants to give up the throne.
You read 1 Samuel: Saul always comes to the place where he says, “Oh yeah, David, you are better than me,” and he leaves. Then he comes back saying, “I am going to kill the guy.” It is the same with us.
The Saul nature has to go to death before David will rule. It has to go under the cross, and then David will rule.
But God chose David because He wanted someone to shepherd His people. What better thing to do than choose a shepherd? A shepherd is a person who cares for those in his flock.
David said, “A bear came upon my flock, and I killed him. A lion came upon my flock. I took the lamb out of its mouth, and I killed him.” He cared for his flock. He cared for the people of God in the same way.
Yes, David had his faults. But God looked at him and said, “There is a man after My own heart.” He looked for a shepherd, a person who had a heart for His own house—for God’s house. So He chose David out of the sheepfold.
David was a person who was in touch with God’s heart.
Fourth, we have Daniel. Here is another one who, in his teenage years, came to the Lord. If you look at Daniel 1 and Daniel 6, they show something about Daniel’s person—not merely prophecy, or what he said, but something that happened to him.
Daniel was carried off to Babylon. We could say he was in the world. We can also say that Daniel was chosen for captivity. That is a hard thing to think about. He was chosen to live in the world, and yet he was not of it.
That is really the story of Daniel. When Daniel came into the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, they saw everything about him: he was good-looking, smart, and everything. They began feeding him the king’s food so that he would learn what they wanted him to know and then enter into service.
Daniel came to a place of saying, “You know, I cannot eat that stuff.” He purposed in his heart that he would be true to the Lord.
I am not saying that purposing in your heart is the end of everything. But when the Lord saw him purpose in his heart, Daniel went to the eunuch in charge of the food and said, “We really cannot eat this stuff. Can we have vegetables and water?”
The eunuch said, “Wait a minute, man. It is my skin here. If I give you that and you guys look bad, it is my skin.” Daniel said, “Why do you not test us for ten days?”
The man agreed. Because Daniel had purposed in his heart, the Lord met him. That is a wonderful thing. When we respond to the Lord and say, “I will purpose in my heart. Lord, I want to meet You. I want to be this one You want,” the Lord does not leave us on our own. He comes back and sets things up. He does things for us.
Because they were eating as they should eat—very kosher—they grew. They were not only strong-looking; they looked healthy.
After ten days, the eunuch was like, “Whoa. Maybe we should start them all on this diet.” But he let them continue, and they became the choice—the cream of the crop.
Then another thing happened. Daniel was exalted, like Joseph. He became like the number two man in the Persian Empire, and people became jealous of him. They said, “Let us get Daniel out of here. Ah, he prays. Let us make a decree.”
Anybody who prayed to another god—or to any god—would be thrown out. Daniel heard the decree. What did he do? He opened his windows and did what he always did: he prayed.
They said, “We got you,” and threw him into the lions’ den. But the whole thing about Daniel is that he was a man in whom there was no compromise.
He could have eaten the king’s food and done well. He could have been somewhere in there. But there was no compromise in him. He said, “No, I am not going to go this way. I am going to be faithful to what I know.”
Even when it came to praying, he could have shut the windows, because it was his private life. But he had always opened his windows and prayed toward Jerusalem, so he did not change a bit, even with these decrees and everything.
The life that the Lord wants in this new man is a life that does not compromise, just like Daniel. Daniel found grace for it.
The fifth one is Ezra. In Ezra 7, it says this about him:
Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.
Ezra was a man who gave himself to the Word. He gave himself to the Word. He let that Word come into him. He dealt with the Word. Like Dana said last night, he had dialogue with the Word, and the Word had an effect on him.
He became one who was a teacher. If you read Nehemiah, where Ezra is reading the Law and is in charge of the Levites, because he taught those Levites, they could give sense to the Word.
Ezra was a person sent back to Israel out of Babylon, out of captivity, because the people there had compromised. The Lord said, “You need to bring these people back to consecration.” The only way we get back to consecration is when we see it in the Word.
The Word convicts us. If you read, especially in Kings, when the prophets speak a word or when they find the Law of the Lord in the house, all of a sudden there is a new consecration. Out go the idols. Out go the high places—well, actually, the high places did not always go, but the idols did.
They clean out the temple. They keep Passover again. They do all those kinds of things because the Word has brought those things into light, and they follow the Word.
Ezra was a man who had a life in the Word. I cannot tell you how important this is. This was an emphasis last night and yesterday.
I remember my mentor, good old Floyd. You guys do not know him, but Floyd Pulice is my mentor. He is our Stephen Kaung on the West Coast. Floyd would always say, “You need a life in the Word and a life in prayer. If you want to go on with the Lord, you need a life in the Word and you need a life in prayer.”
Ezra had those: a life in the Word and a life in prayer.
Finally, the sixth one is Elisha. We do not often hear about Elisha, do we? You know why? Because we do not read the Old Testament very often. The Old Testament is so big; we only get a little bit here and there.
But you can find Elisha in 1 Kings 19, where he receives his call, and through about halfway into 2 Kings.
You know what is interesting about Elisha? Elijah, who was his mentor, was the prophet of judgment—the prophet who brought judgment and said, “You need to return to the Lord.”
If you read throughout Elisha’s life, it is full of life. Everything he touches comes alive. There is poison in the pot; he throws something in it, and it is made safe. An axe falls into the river; a stick is thrown in, and the axe floats up. Naaman is a leper; he is told to wash seven times.
Even when Elisha died, they threw a dead man into the cave where his bones were, and the corpse touched the bones of Elisha and sprang to life. Elisha was full of life.
One reason he was full of life is that, when he dedicated himself to follow Elijah, 2 Kings 2 shows his tenacity. Elijah seemed to be trying to get rid of Elisha: “We are going to Jericho; you stay here.” Elisha said, “I am going to follow you.”
Then Elijah said, “Now we are going to Bethel. You stay here.” Elisha said, “I am going to follow you.” “I am going to cross the Jordan. You stay here.” “No, I am going to follow you.”
There was this tenacity about him: “I am going to follow you. I am just going to follow you.”
Finally, Elijah struck the Jordan River with his cloak, and it split in half as they walked across. Then Elijah said to Elisha, “What do you want? What do you really want?”
Elisha said, “I want double of what you have got. That is what I want. I do not have it in myself. I want what you have got. As a matter of fact, I want more of it.”
Elijah said, “I will tell you what: if you see me carried away, you have got it. The Lord will grant it to you.”
It must have been an awesome sight. The chariots of fire came and took Elijah away in a whirlwind. Elisha watched the whole thing. Then, when Elijah was gone, Elisha began to walk back toward Jericho. He came to the Jordan River, took Elijah’s cloak, struck the water, and it split open.
Elisha was a man filled with the Spirit of God because he saw the One ascend, knew where He was, and asked, “Lord, I do not have enough in myself. I want what You have, and I want more.”
Now we look at these six, and this is exactly what the redeemed man is supposed to be:
All of these are the joints—the supply that we give to others in the Body. We become joints of supply.
But seven is the number of completion, and I only have six here. Where did I go wrong? Maybe I should have had someone else. I know. Let us go back to Mark 10.
We began with the rich young ruler asking, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” All these things that we have looked at—that is eternal life. That is the life of Christ right there.
Jesus said, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.” Then He spoke of the commandments. The young man said, “Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “One thing you lack.”
Here is the seventh part:
“One thing you lack. Go your way, sell whatever you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me.”
The missing piece here is you.
These things are not supposed to stand by themselves as things to look at, except to see that this is the finished product.
Have you ever pictured yourself as finished? Have you ever looked at yourself and said, “I am going to be complete”? Why do we not look that far?
We are like the muckraker in The Pilgrim’s Progress. He sits there, and all he can see is what he is not. He is raking up all the trash, and right above him is glory and a crown, but he never sees it.
Why? Because he is trying to become those six things. That is the trouble with something like this. We get hold of something and see, “This is what Christ is. This is what we are meant to be.” Then we try to accomplish it instead of saying, “That is Him.”
But that Him—those six things that are to be the new man—are the very things that have come into us to live, to dwell, and to grow, until everything that we see outwardly as merely ourselves no longer exists because these things have taken their place.
We have hard times with these things, and so we ask, “How can these things be? How does this come about?”
Let us end with the word at the end of Luke 2, which we have been reading almost the whole time. After Jesus discussed with the teachers of the Law and said, “I must be about My Father’s business,” we have this little verse that I think we sometimes misread.
Luke 2:51 says:
Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them.
How do these things come about? You go home.
You go home. That is how they come about. They do not come about here. They come about when you go home.
It says He came to Nazareth and was subject to them. It is real interesting: it does not say He was subject to the Law. He was subject to people—to personalities, to His mother and father. Most generally, I would think especially to His father, because his father was the ruler of the house.
We try to build up a case of saying, “I have a list of things on the wall, and this is what I am going to do.” We forget that is not how it is accomplished. It is accomplished in our life.
It is like Jesus. When He went home, He went back to being an apprentice.
When you are an apprentice and you first go into a cabinet shop, you look around at all the tools and say, “What are these things?” There are so many different kinds of hammers in a cabinetmaker’s shop: a ball-peen hammer, a claw hammer, a finishing hammer, different kinds of mallets. Then there are the saws: coping saws, miter saws, crosscut saws. Then there are power saws, files, and rasps.
How are you going to know how to do these things?
You come into the shop, and the master craftsman says, “You having a little trouble here, buddy? I will tell you what. Here is a broom.”
That is what you do. You start out with a broom. You sweep up sawdust and things like that. But as you are doing those little things, they begin asking you to do other little things. You start learning what the tools are because they start asking for them.
“Get me a left-handed sky hook.” Some of you remember that one. A guy goes into the closet saying, “What?” There is no such thing. It is a really bad joke. These guys do not even get it because they are cerebral.
But then they begin saying, “Get me a rasp file.” “What is a rasp file?” “Let me show you what it is.” Pretty soon, it is, “Come here. Can you hold onto this while I clamp it down?”
Little by little by little, you learn.
Generally speaking, if we look at the history of the guild age, an apprentice began around seven or eight years old and stayed with the master for seven or eight years. He lived in the house of the master craftsman. He was fed. He did not receive pay, but he was taken care of by the master craftsman.
That is what I mean when I say, “Go home.” You go home because you have a Master Craftsman.
You have the Holy Spirit living in you, and He is going to lead you into all things. You go home to an assembly with God’s people. You will be with people who have some experience with what they are doing.
When they see you doing something, they may ask you to help. They may say, “Hey, you are going the wrong way here.” In the same way, you are in the care of the Lord. You are not left to yourself.
Have you noticed that you have almost been told to do nothing? No one said, “Hey, you have got to do this, this, and the other thing,” except that you need to eat.
It is the Word. You need to have the Word. That has been an overriding emphasis. There is nothing about, “Well, you need to do this and you need to do that.” That is beside the point.
God is saying, “I am going to tell you. I will tell you when I am ready to, and when you are ready for it. You just go home, be faithful to be in that Word, and have dialogue with Me. I will take care of leading you the rest of the way, because you are My workmanship.”
“I have created you for good works, and I will lead you into those good works. But you are My workmanship. You have to trust Me.”
That is the whole thing. We have not been brought to a place where commandments have been brought down and there is fire on the mountain and we are scared, saying, “I am afraid I am going to fail.”
The Lord says, “You are an apprentice. You are going to fail. But I know that. I have made provision for it, and I am taking care of it.”
“My plan is that I take you all the way, that you become a journeyman, and that from there I send you out. But until I send you out, you are My apprentice. It is okay.”
Can you live with that? Can you live with not having everything right now? Can you live with saying, “Lord, I have to learn You. I have to find out about You”?
It is not merely that I have to find out about You in a book. I have to find out about this life in me. How does this work?
That is not something for me to tell you. That is something for you to experience. That is something for you to go to the Lord and say, “Lord, You say this life is in me. How? Where? What does it do? How does it work? How do I know it is working?”
That is for you to do, because that is how the Lord becomes real to you. If you merely think, “Okay, I learned this, so that is what it is, and I believe it,” that is not it.
We go and say, “I do not know.” Then the Lord says, “Yes, but I do. Yoke with Me. Come on. I will lead you, because I know the path.”
With that in mind, I want to close by saying that our Lord’s business is to make you into this new person, this new creature. That is His business, and that is what we are to be occupied with.
But we are not to be occupied in our own strength. We are to be occupied with Him as He brings it to pass. All we do is, as He leads us and as He speaks, find it in ourselves to say, “Yes, Lord.”
That is what submission is: “Yes, Lord. I will do this.”
Let us pray.
Our Heavenly Father, we want to thank You so much that You have not left this to ourselves. Oh Lord, how wonderful it is to know that there is a hope for us—the hope that we will be complete.
Oh Lord, I pray, even for myself, that I could see the end and have that hope, that expectation, that it will be done. May I see in that hope an expectation that has such an effect on me, that has that purifying part in my life which draws me to You.
Lord, give us that heart that sees that. Then give us that heart that says, “I can go home, and You will take care of me.” I do not have to be in only a conference situation.
Lord, I thank You that I have been in this situation, but now, as I go home, I want to find You for myself.
Lord, I pray that as we go home, we will find You for ourselves; that we will begin to dialogue with You; that You will become the living God to us; and that we will know You.
We ask this in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.