To say that I’m glad to be here is a redundancy. I truly am, and I thank the Lord for bringing me here amongst you.
Let’s just look to the Lord for a moment.
Father, we commit this time to You. We ask, Lord, that Your Spirit will anoint our lips as well as our ears, and that no word will be spoken without that anointing. No word will be heard without that anointing.
We pray, Lord, that our eyes may be fixed on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith. Let us look off to Jesus this morning, Lord, that You will be lifted up. It will be on the ground of the risen Son of God this morning.
And so we commit these few minutes to You, that You will be praised, worshipped, exalted, revered, honored, and loved. In Your precious name. Amen.
It’s a great pleasure and privilege to be here, to stay with Mac and Stella, whom I call Priscilla and Aquila. Yesterday I had the privilege of sneaking a peek in his library. Have you ever seen Mac’s library? Wow.
Especially the one downstairs, where he has all his biographies and histories and things. The whole house is full of books, but downstairs is the sanctum sanctorum, or the inner sanctum. Only special people are allowed down there, so I felt very privileged to get a sneak look at the real library, where Mac spends a lot of time.
I was looking at all these biographies, and Mac and I were talking about them—how wonderful it is that you can read two or three or four biographies about a person and get a different slant on that person. One person writing a biography will give you one particular slant, and then somebody else will write a biography about the same person and give you a different slant. You get a whole different view of that person.
Then I thought about how the Holy Spirit is writing the biography of the Lord Jesus Christ in our hearts. Do you remember that verse in 2 Corinthians? Second Corinthians 3:2:
Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men;
being made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ ministered by us,
written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God;
not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh.
Remember how the finger of God wrote on the stone tablets the Ten Commandments—the law, which speaks of Christ? But now, in this age, in this dispensation, the finger of God is writing not on stone tablets, but on hearts of flesh—on you and me.
And He is writing the biography of Jesus Christ.
Everything that was true of the Lord Jesus, except for His divinity, is being written in our hearts and must be true of you and me: His supernatural birth, His baptism, His early training, His sufferings, His crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and glorification.
Everything is true of us that was true of Him. That’s our lives. That’s our whole Christian life: the biography of the Lord Jesus being written now. All the things that we are experiencing are that life of Christ being written in our hearts.
And I just thought, wow, what a wonderful thing to read the biography of the Lord Jesus in this brother, and that sister, and here and there—in every one of us. We see Christ. We see Him.
We get a different slant on the Lord Jesus as we see Him and His life being worked out and written in our hearts. So what a joy it is to be here, to see you, to see the Lord Jesus being written in your hearts, and to see Him being written in my heart.
Well, that’s just for openers. I guess you want me to tell about my experiences, and I guess I could tell you stories from here to—what have we got, a couple hours?
No, I’ve got to think about the nursery workers, you know, so we have to remember them.
Why did I come? I live in Arizona, and I had some recent heart surgery. My heart valve was kind of closing off. I wasn’t feeling bad; I really had very few symptoms.
When the doctor told me that I needed my chest opened and my heart operated on, I thought, “Well, no way.” Nobody was going to cut me up, and I didn’t even want to go to the surgeon. Being a retired surgeon myself, I knew that surgeons love to surge.
So I knew that if I went to him, he was going to tell me I needed an operation. But the Lord kind of convicted me, and then that verse came in Proverbs 23:26:
My son, give me thy heart.
That kind of got to me.
So I went to the surgeon, and he explained, “It’s going to get worse, and you’re in pretty good condition now. Don’t wait till you get real bad and we have to carry you in.”
So I said, “Lord, I’ll give You my heart.”
So they cut me open and put a pig valve in. I’m still looking for porcine traits coming out, if you know what I mean. I haven’t started rolling around in the mud yet, but I’ve got to be on my guard for that.
Anyway, that was on the sixth of May, and the Lord has been very good and brought me through very well. This is my first trip back east since then.
And the two real burdens that I had—one was to see my granddaughter, who lives in Roanoke. She’s just twenty. I hadn’t seen her in about seven years, and her home situation is not good.
So the Lord really put a burden on my heart to reconnect with her and to represent a kind of male figure in her life and her home. That was my first mission, and I spent a couple of days in Roanoke.
I’m thankful to say that it went very well, and the Lord really blessed. I’m very, very happy to see my granddaughter. She’s just finished her first year at Liberty, and she loves the Lord.
The other burden I’ve had—really the burden—is the matter of our oneness with one another and with the Lord. During the period of my wife’s illness—she was ill for two and a half years with cancer—it was an experience of drawing us close and really fashioning us into a single unit.
That is the working out of what the Lord has told us that He wants: that the two shall be one. Three times in the Bible we are given that word—in Genesis, in Matthew, and in Ephesians—that the two shall be one.
And I will say that, of all things, that was the first really deep lesson that I learned during this time: the oneness that illustrates our oneness with the Lord Jesus Christ.
And to carry it further, our oneness with the members of His body—that He wants, that He desires, that He needs, and that the world needs to see amongst us. That is our greatest testimony: the oneness of the believers.
You remember, in the early days of Christianity, this was the testimony of the early believers. This was one of the reasons why the gospel spread so rapidly. People saw the love that the brethren had for each other. They were overcome by love, and this is what drew them to the gospel, to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Oh, how deep a love there was. And that is our testimony. That is the gospel that we preach—our lives, our sermon. People read the sermon in our lives.
Is there love? Is there oneness? Is there reciprocity between believers? It starts out with husband and wife. Is there a closeness, a love, between husband and wife? That is the gospel, isn’t it? The love of Jesus.
And I just have a burden to see that.
The word that has come to me has been this word concerning Epaphras. He speaks about Epaphras striving for you in prayer—striving. That word, “striving,” is from the Greek agonizomai, or agonizing in prayer.
It is the word used in relation to the games, competing in the Olympics, striving to win. You’re going all out. Epaphras here, and Paul, were striving for the brethren. Colossians 4:12:
Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, saluteth you,
always striving for you in his prayers.
Isn’t that wonderful? He is going all out for you. It’s like Elisha and the Shunammite’s son. He laid his whole body on that dead body—the young man. He put his lips to the boy’s lips, and he was in it all the way.
Epaphras is, without reservation and without anything held back, striving in prayer. Can we be strivers in prayer?
This matter of unity is a desperate matter. It is desperately important to the Lord, and it should be to us. So let us be Epaphrases, striving in prayer that the Lord will get His way, that there will be that unity, that oneness—not a manufactured unity, not merely an ecumenical unity.
I mean oneness of heart, oneness of spirit. And I think that’s what Paul means.
I’ll just tell you a couple of thoughts as my wife and I went through this experience of her illness. In many ways, it was a terrible experience. But in many ways, I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
I wouldn’t ask not to have gone through it, because the lessons learned are priceless. As we come out and look back on our sufferings and trials and fiery trials, I think you realize and appreciate what God has done, and has been doing, in your life through these experiences.
It is His grace, His mercy, to allow you to go through these things. I think of Philippians 1:29:
Because to you it hath been granted in the behalf of Christ,
not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer in His behalf.
It hath been granted to you to suffer. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that almost revolutionary? This idea that suffering is a gift—it has been given to us to suffer.
Who of us looks for ways to suffer? We look for ways out. But it is a gift of God to allow us to go through these fiery trials. And as we go through, His grace is sufficient.
There were a couple of instances in the deepest part of suffering—when you get the news that the tumor marker has gone back up, and things like that—when the Lord just came through and reassured us and lifted us up.
In Genesis 1, in the story of creation, God said in verse 6:
Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,
and let it divide the waters from the waters.
The waters speak of the waters of tribulation—the waters of the Red Sea, the waters of the Jordan, the waters of death, the waters of baptism, Jonah in the ocean: the waters of death and resurrection, coming out of the waters.
But here He says:
Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,
and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament
from the waters which were above the firmament:
and God called the firmament Heaven.
So there was evening, and there was morning. We are in the waters, but we are in heaven. God put us there between the waters—waters above and waters below. But in heaven, heaven is surrounded by waters.
To me, it was a wonderful picture of being surrounded by the waters of tribulation and suffering, and yet being there in heaven. Heaven is a place between the waters.
Then the other picture was the ark. God putting us in the ark. Of course, the ark speaks of Christ, and the Lord put us in the ark, put us in Christ. The ark is resting on the ground.
Then the waters come, and the waters lift the ark up and lift it all the way to Ararat. Ararat, I understand, means holy ground.
We’re on holy ground because we are in the ark. The waters, again—the waters of tribulation, the waters of death—lift us up. Without the waters, that ark would never reach Ararat. It would stay down on the ground there. But because of the waters, we’re lifted up to holy ground.
So those are just little pictures of what we experience when we go through these waters.
Well, all of this is by way of introduction. I really wanted to speak for the next hour or two on this matter of knowing the Lord—on knowing the Lord.
One of the brothers this morning prayed, “Lord, we want to know You, and we don’t want to know about You; we want to know You.” And I really responded to that. That’s really what I’m talking about.
We know all about Him. We’ve heard about Him. We study Him. We study the Scriptures, and we memorize, and we know about Him. But do we know Him? Do we really know Him?
It’s a matter of vital importance. God wants us to know Him.
I just want to reference a few Scriptures. Philippians 3:10:
That I may know Him,
and the power of His resurrection,
and the fellowship of His sufferings,
becoming conformed unto His death.
Then John 14:9:
Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you,
and dost thou not know Me, Philip?
He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.
Dost thou not know Me? You’ve been these years with Me, living with Me, walking with Me, listening to Me. Don’t you know Me yet?
Then Hebrews 8:8 speaks of the new covenant:
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord,
that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.
We are the house. We are the Israel of God, Paul tells us in Galatians. This is the new Israel. You and I are Israelites—the Israel of God. God tells us He will make a new covenant, and He has made a new covenant, a new agreement, with us.
This is part of the covenant, Hebrews 8:10–11:
This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, saith the Lord;
I will put My laws into their mind,
and on their heart also will I write them;
and I will be to them a God,
and they shall be to Me a people.
And they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen,
and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord:
for all shall know Me.
That’s His promise, and that’s His desire. All shall know Me. He wants us to know Him—know Him intimately, not just to know about Him, but to know Him.
First John 2:20 says:
And ye have an anointing from the Holy One,
and ye know all things.
We have the anointing, and we know all things.
Knowing the Lord is the secret of our strength, the secret of our steadfastness, and the secret of our service. It all springs from knowing the Lord.
This was Paul’s one passion in life. The Lord has just put this on my heart: oh, how I need to know Him.
It’s the whole thrust of the letter to the Hebrews: knowing the Lord. It is the secret of life, service, endurance, and confidence.
Now, when we talk about knowing Him, we have to look at the life of the Lord Jesus as God’s representative here in His earthly life. It was a life of utter dependence on God. His whole life was dependent on God.
John 5:19:
The Son can do nothing of Himself,
but what He seeth the Father doing.
This was a fundamental principle of the life of the Lord Jesus: knowing the Father, doing nothing of Himself, but relating everything to the Father and bowing to the Father’s will.
Not My will, but Thine, be done.
All the words that He spoke, all the works that He did, all the people with whom He had to do, the times of His going and coming—“My time is not yet”—everything was governed by His inward knowledge of the Father.
He knew when He might not, and when He might, give His life.
God intends this principle to be kept as the basic law of the life of the people of God in this age: our knowing Him and knowing His mind.
We see the practical outworking of this in the book of Acts. Paul was looking to go to Macedonia, but the Spirit would not permit him. The Spirit of Jesus held him back, keeping him in check: “No, you can’t go. You go this way, not that.”
We see the doctrine of it in the Epistles, but we see the practical outworking in the book of Acts.
John 17:3: “This is life eternal, that they should know Thee.” Life in fullness. And that’s the most important objective of God’s dealings with us.
I realized, after two and a half years, when the Lord in His sovereignty and His grace and mercy took her home—why?
It was because He loved me.
And it was because He wanted me to know Him.
Well, that explains all of our experience:
That I may know Him,
and the power of His resurrection,
and the fellowship of His sufferings.
This explains all of what we’re going through. The Holy Spirit is arranging, very carefully and very specifically, every little detail of our lives in order that we may come to know Him.
It explains all the tight corners, all the predicaments. You wonder why you’re in this tight spot. Well, God has arranged it in His sovereignty in order for you and me to know Him—not really to know about Him, but to know Him.
And it’s the only way we get to know Him. There is no other way, brothers and sisters. There’s no shortcut to it.
And I can tell you, it takes a lifetime. You don’t know Him just by reading a book, just by listening to a sermon, just by Bible study and so forth. These are all good. They’re all important. They’re all necessary.
Don’t let me deter you from your Bible study and all the sermons you listen to and all that. That’s good. But you listen to the Spirit within, Who is dealing with you, Who is taking you through these experiences in order that you may know Jesus—know Him.
In other words, it’s experimental, or experiential. Gee whiz, there’s just no other way.
And we thank the Lord for Him, because it’s His gift to allow us to suffer, to allow us to go through these experiences in order to know Him.
We can do all of those other things and get a very inadequate and limited personal knowledge of God. But the Lord often has to take away our work and other things so that we may discover Him.
The ultimate value of everything is not in the information we give, the soundness of our doctrine, the amount of work we do for the Lord, or the measure of truth that we present. It’s all very important, all very good, but the fact that we know the Lord in a deep and mighty way—that will remain when everything else goes by the board.
Our real service to others is based on our knowledge of the Lord. You can’t serve others without knowing the source, knowing Christ.
It involves this matter of guidance. Guidance is so basic—one of the greatest problems in the Christian life. We seek guidance and pray about it. We commit it to the Lord, then do what seems right, trusting God that it will turn out okay.
Well, that’s not really guidance, is it? There’s a big difference between getting direction for events, for specific events and incidents and contingencies of life, and having an abiding personal knowledge of the Lord—to have the mind of Christ.
It’s like the difference between calling a friend and asking for advice on a specific issue, as opposed to living with that person for a while and getting to know how they would act and what they think about things.
It is getting to live with the Lord Jesus, to know Him—what He would do. In other words, intuitively knowing the mind of Christ. That’s what we’re talking about: getting to know the Lord.
Getting to know Him so well that you know His personality, His mind, and what He would do in such situations.
Well, we do have the mind of Christ. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians, and in Philippians he says:
Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
You remember that wonderful passage in Philippians 2:5.
Today, personal inward spiritual knowledge is a very rare thing. But without it, we are subject to the enemy’s attacks in the way of counterfeits, delusions, and false representations.
Our greatest safeguard against such things will be the deep knowledge of the Lord through discipline.
When we reach out for things—experiences, proofs, evidences, and so forth—we become exposed to Satan and his attacks, who gives us false conversions, false baptisms of the Spirit, false guidance, and then, when these things are withdrawn, the suggestion that we’ve committed the unpardonable sin.
We are prey to all sorts of delusions by the enemy. The blood is removed, the power of the blood, the assurance of our salvation, and we think we have lost it. We are on very, very dangerous ground.
So this matter of knowing the Lord is of absolutely vital importance. As I get older, I see how much more necessary it is to know Him—to really know Him.
To know the Lord deeply means steadfastness, solidity through times of fiery trial. Knowledge produces confidence—a quiet, restful strength which speaks of great depth of life.
In Christ all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. It is God’s will that we know Him. He wants us to know Him. He wants us to get to know Him and to appreciate Him and to know His mind. Hebrews 8:11 tells us this.
Paul, at the very end of his long life, said this was the passion of his life: “That I may know Him.” Well, if Paul, at the end of his life, said, “I want to know Him,” how much more you and I need to know Him.
It is as if Paul, about to enter into eternity, is saying, “Wow, the vastness of Christ—it’s going to take me all eternity to know Him.” And it will, because He is such a great Christ.
But again, it is such a joy to know Christ in you, and you, and me—to see Him. Praise the Lord. What He’s doing in us is writing His biography in us.
Lord, just take these words and cover them with the precious blood. We pray that You’ll speak to us and lead us on and give us that urge to know You—to stop at nothing to know You, not about You, but to know You.
Lord, we worship You and praise You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.